WSL2 could replace Dual Boot

Ishan jain December 10, 2020 21:23

What would you say, if I said, you can access the RTX3090 you have in WSL2? Or use xclock in windows?

Disclaimer: Currently I am employed by Microsoft, but my views and thoughts are still my own. The reason I joined Microsoft was, the work Microsoft have been doing for last couple of years in Open Source Space. Today I am a advocate for Open Source representing Microsoft.

In May 2020, I did a presentation of WSL2 at the Dublin Linux Conference. Since then, there have been some new and exciting announcements.

To be more precise in September 2020 Microsoft announced several exciting features in upcoming releases.

In near feature, you will be able to run GUI Linux application through WSL2. This means, I will not need to either Dual Boot, or have a full blown VM for GUI only Linux applications. From what I can understand it is good old X forward.

You will be able to mount Linux only file systems in Windows through WSL2. So you don't need to have a Linux installation on your computer to read that old hdd you have with ext filesystem. If I understand it right, you should be able to mount any file system in WSL2 you can in Linux.
WSL2 will have capability to mount physical drives directly to the nano VM WSL2 uses. After that you can access the data through SMB proxy WSL2 has.

For the people with needs to run machine learning, WSL2 will allow you to run the ML workload, via DirectML on a GPU.

Most important (for me at least), you will be able to install WSL with a single command. The new flag will install the WSL, VM Platform, get and install WSL2 kernel, set the default version to WSL2 and install Ubuntu (by default).