> they abandoned that approach in WSL 2 because, among other reasons, it was just too much work to achieve Linux compatibility
Any particular citation for this claim? I tried to do some searching and couldn't find anything definitive, but my memory from contemporaneous conversations and articles suggests that the primary reason was really performance, since the differences in how filesystem access in particular work between Windows/Linux were such that some of the I/O bottlenecks were deemed too difficult to impossible to address.
Certainly WSL2 has higher compatibility, but I'm not sure that compatibility and not performance was the primary driver, and would love a source if you have one.
Relatedly, it's worth noting that a number of other platforms have developed and shipped syscall translation layers for Linux binaries, including FreeBSD and SmartOS/illumos.
> Our top requests from the WSL community have been to increase the file system performance, and make more apps work inside of WSL (i.e: introduce better system call compatibility). We have heard your feedback, and are glad to announce that WSL 2 helps solve these issues.
> In WSL 1 we created a translation layer that interprets many of these system calls and allows them to work on the Windows NT kernel. However, it’s challenging to implement all of these system calls, resulting in some apps being unable to run in WSL 1. Now that WSL 2 includes its own Linux kernel it has full system call compatibility.
The WSL2 architecture video lists two motivators from WSL1 based on number of Github issues. One of them being file performance and the other syscall compatibility with some specific examples being the ptrace syscall and Docker compatibilty.
https://youtu.be/lwhMThePdIo?t=755
Any particular citation for this claim? I tried to do some searching and couldn't find anything definitive, but my memory from contemporaneous conversations and articles suggests that the primary reason was really performance, since the differences in how filesystem access in particular work between Windows/Linux were such that some of the I/O bottlenecks were deemed too difficult to impossible to address.
Certainly WSL2 has higher compatibility, but I'm not sure that compatibility and not performance was the primary driver, and would love a source if you have one.
Relatedly, it's worth noting that a number of other platforms have developed and shipped syscall translation layers for Linux binaries, including FreeBSD and SmartOS/illumos.