Comment by zamadatix
2 days ago
Fascinating area to work in! I've had a few curiosity things come to mind before:
What's the driving use case for Starnix? Well, obviously "run Linux apps on Fuchsia" like the RFC for it says... but "very specific apps as part of a specific use case which might be timeboxed" or "any app for the foreseeable future"?
How complete in app support do you currently consider it compared to something like WSL1?
What are your thoughts about why WSL2 went the opposite direction?
Thanks!
> Fascinating area to work in!
I agree! Lots of fun stuff to do.
> What's the driving use case for Starnix?
The Starnix code is open source like the rest of Fuchsia and anyone is obviously free to read it and form their own opinions about where it's useful or where it's headed, but as a mere corporate employee I can't comment on direction/strategy :(.
> How complete in app support do you currently consider it compared to something like WSL1?
I'm only familiar with WSL1 as an occasional user so I can't really say for sure.
We run (and pass) a lot of tests compiled for Linux from the Linux Test Project, gVisor's compatibility test suite, and some other sources. There are still a lot of those tests that we don't yet pass :).
> What are your thoughts about why WSL2 went the opposite direction?
I don't know much about the history there. I've heard Nth-hand rumors that MS had a product strategy shift from Windows Phone Android compat (a relatively focused use case where edge cases might be acceptable) to trying to court developers (a broad use case where varying from their deployment environment might cause problems). I have no idea whether those rumors are accurate.
I've also heard that it was hard to make Linux programs perform well on top of NTFS, and that virtualized ext4 actually worked better for Linux workloads where fs performance mattered at all. Something something dirent cache for stat()? Some of this is discussed on the WSL1 vs WSL2 web page[0].
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versio...
My money's on fuchsia developing as a potential android replacement, or at least replacement for the linux kernel, keeping the android userspace. Maybe something something chromeos unified computer phone tablet experience.