Comment by Mister_Snuggles
8 years ago
Alongside is an apt description. It feels a bit like running Linux in a Docker container.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has it's own directory in the Windows filesystem that corresponds to /. It's uses some NTFS magic to store the Linux file attributes that don't directly correspond to NTFS file attributes.
It also, within the Linux environment, mounts your host drives under /mnt.
For what I generally use the OSX terminal for, WSL probably hits about 80-90% of my use cases. A lot of lower level utilities have weird issues - e.g., 'ip addr' seems to present the Windows network interfaces as though they were typical Linux ones, 'ss -a' gives a bunch of netlink errors, dmesg says "dmesg: read kernel buffer failed: Function not implemented", 'tcpdump' doesn't work, etc. On the other hand, curl, scp, ssh, etc do exactly what you'd expect.
My limited experience with WSL gave me the impression that anything that needed /low level/ packet constructs either wasn't mapped correctly or might have required administrative privilege blessing on the Windows side of the environment ACLs.
I hope that these get filled out, at least with more constructive error returns, at some later date.
For now, I'm happy that they have enough of the low hanging fruit ripened sufficiently to make it possible to do 'normal' things from within WSL. I'd honestly rather they make the local (and network) filesystem more performant and robust; maybe they have.
My use case for WSL is coming around in the calendar year again so I'll be revisiting it soon.