alt Hacker NewsIs there a way to visualize this on a running system or some documentation that describes it? I'm not familiar with the plumbing here but did try to find some documentation.
Is there a way to visualize this on a running system or some documentation that describes it? I'm not familiar with the plumbing here but did try to find some documentation.
I've done a lot of in-depth WSL2 work, so I'm just aware of its particulars, but to cite some documentation-
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about
"WSL 2 uses virtualization technology to run a Linux kernel inside of a lightweight utility virtual machine (VM). Linux distributions run as isolated containers inside of the WSL 2 managed VM. Linux distributions running via WSL 2 will share the same network namespace, device tree (other than /dev/pts), CPU/Kernel/Memory/Swap, /init binary, but have their own PID namespace, Mount namespace, User namespace, Cgroup namespace, and init process."
(under "What is WSL2"?)
https://www.docker.com/blog/new-docker-desktop-wsl2-backend/
"WSL 2 runs all distros in the same utility VM, sharing the same Kernel."
If you run multiple distros take a look at the process manager and find the single vmmem or vmmemWSL (newer versions have the latter). That single instance is all of the instances, and all of the docker containers you might be running as well, each with namespace isolation (with WSL2 having intentional bridging between them for convenience). Visualise it by doing something intensive in any of them and seeing the single process react, because that's the single utility VM responsible for all of them. Further while starting up the first WSL2 instance or Docker container is expensive, requiring the initialisation of all of the resources for the utility VM and the memory to support it, subsequent iterations are much less expensive.