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Microsoft Windows Linux for Everybody

posted by martyb on Sunday March 15 2020, @03:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the EEE? dept.

takyon writes:

Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux is coming to all Windows 10 users (archive):

You won't have to be a tester to try Windows 10's new, built-in Linux kernel in the near future. Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 will be widely available when Windows 10 version 2004 arrives. You'll have to install it manually for a "few months" until an update adds automatic installs and updates, but that's a small price to pay if you want Linux and Windows to coexist in peace and harmony. It'll be easier to set up, at least -- the kernel will now be delivered through Windows Update instead of forcing you to install an entire Windows image.

Embrace, Extend... Excite!

Windows blog post.

Previously: Windows 10 Will Soon Ship with a Full, Open Source, GPLed Linux Kernel

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Sunday March 15 2020, @05:02PM (3 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Sunday March 15 2020, @05:02PM (#971614) Journal

    What they are going to do is hire a bunch of "volunteers" to start tweaking Linux base libs so they only compile in Visual Studio

    Uh, what? Visual Studio can't build ELF binaries, so this would break all of the compilers that can actually build a working binary. What insane upstream projects do you think would accept those patches, even if this were Microsoft's goal?

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  • (Score: 2) by dry on Sunday March 15 2020, @10:34PM (2 children)

    by dry (223) on Sunday March 15 2020, @10:34PM (#971690) Journal

    How hard would it be to add ELF to the VS linker? I believe that wlink, the OpenWatcom linker can do it both ways, linking ELF objects to build a Win32 or in the case of the fork, win64 binaries or OBJ (OMF) object files to make a ELF binary.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday March 16 2020, @09:40AM (1 child)

      by TheRaven (270) on Monday March 16 2020, @09:40AM (#971829) Journal
      It's not just the linker. The compiler doesn't know about ELF, doesn't know about SysV ABIs, doesn't know about ELF visibility (which is not the same as dllimport / dllexport). It would be a fairly large engineering effort for absolutely no gain. What would Microsoft gain from making people use Visual Studio's compiler for Linux? Linux devs can already use VSCode with Clang or GCC, and that doesn't cost compiler engineer time.
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      • (Score: 2) by dry on Monday March 16 2020, @02:42PM

        by dry (223) on Monday March 16 2020, @02:42PM (#971887) Journal

        I still wouldn't be surprised if MS started to add ELF support at some point. They seem to like people using their toolchain, though you may well be right about them not wasting the resources.