HNNewShowAskJobs
Built with Tanstack Start
Isn't WSL2 just a VM?(ssg.dev)
9 points by sedatk a day ago | 2 comments
  • mindcrash11 hours ago

    WSL 2 runs on a subset of Hyper-V, and on a hypervisor, so basically yes.

    However, there's some interesting things going on in WSL 2 versus a "normal" Hyper-V virtual machine. For example, a Linux distro running on WSL can (and will) use GPU partitioning (aka PCI/GPU passthrough) and a special implementation of DirectX enabling the installed video card to accelerate graphics within X and/or Wayland.

    Although this feature can be enabled with a lot of hacking in both the Linux guest and vanilla Hyper-V on the host (the latter through Powershell) it is officially unsupported on Windows 10 and Windows 11, and is only supported on Windows Server.

    • sedatk7 hours ago |parent

      Oh, I thought GPU passthrough was enabled on vanilla Windows 11, but I didn't delve into that feature enough. It's still extremely impressive of course. Perhaps I should write another article about graphical features.