WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

themeiguoren

I can’t find any benchmarks on this, anyone have a sense of the speedup that can be expected here? And for what it’s worth, that version isn’t available yet when I try to update WSL.

avadodin

If it is as good of an improvement as the first major update, it will be hard to tell from native. Hopefully, they will just push it out to everyone asap. We make heavy use of symlinks into Windows drives.

chris_money202

They are undoubtly doing this because so many users operate out of /mnt/c with zero clue of that implication.

thesis

Moved to mac about 7 years ago because of horrible WSL file system speed was.

phowat

Tangentially , I was a heavy used of wsl and moved to linux a few months ago and LLMs made most of the downsides of using linux as a desktop go away for me. I chatted with claude about the migration to find the best distro, decided on Fedora. After the install I asked everything I wanted to configured and got straight answers. In 3 or 4 hours I had an even more comfortable experience than I had on windows. AI made the annoying parts of trying to figure out how to edit all the config files to have linux behave the way you want very easy. I also had claude code write a bunch of scripts that I could have done but would probably never bring myself to actually do it . WHen you have a coding agent readily available , having an open source desktop environment makes a lot more sense. I encourage everyone to try it.

avaer

Proton, Copilot, and literally this single issue are what pushed people to Linux. If I were in charge there would be a team devoted to fixing this a decade ago. WSL singlehandedly stemmed much of tide of developers moving away from Windows, but WSL native filesystem performance gave devs that magical experience when they boot into Linux the first time and see that the filesystem doesn't have to be ass. There's always been hacks around this, but for many devs the easiest hack was to ditch Windows. They should have moved heaven to fix this on day one, there's really no engineering excuse. Linux is open source.

mattkevan

Where are we on the embrace/extend/extinguish curve right about now?

zaptheimpaler

I was trying WSL years ago and this is one of the reasons I just moved to a full linux server instead. We still have way too many problems interfacing across filesystems. I hope with AI we will see an iteration on ExFAT that has all the journalling, versioning etc. magic of modern FS' and can be adopted across all 3 OSes. Probably a long shot but I can dream :)

phendrenad2

Hopefully they're heading towards a "boot to Linux" mode.

sanp

Hasn’t this always been the case? I have always run builds under WSL2 in Windows because of this.

tonymet

counterpoint: WSL is great. I like it. I enjoy & prefer Windows desktop & Linux terminal. very happy.

kenz0r

What killed WSL for me was the incredibly janky way I had to share USB peripherals. usb-ipd works 80% of the time, all the time.

agentultra

Do the audio buffers to the host device next!

cmovq

I had no idea they used the Plan 9 file server for accessing files in WSL. I wonder what the original reasoning for choosing 9P was.

asveikau

I was always disappointed with the design of wsl2. The wsl1 design of a syscall layer atop NT had greater architectural purity. They way I heard it, they introduced a virtual machine into the design specifically in order to bypass poor NT filesystem performance. I'm sure it's easier said than done, but it would have been nice if they instead fixed the issues on the NT side, rather than side step them with a VM.

anamax

I switched from WSL (reconn'd to WSL1) to WSL2 because I thought that WSL1 would be abandoned. However, the shell for WSL2 runs in a window that grabs things, such as ^V. So, ssh from WSL2 (to AWS for example) is awkward. For exampl, Emacs on the AWS box is almost unusable.

psyclobe

WSL1 was really really fast! It was quite unique system too totally customized for the Linux kernel and windows interfacing! Was really disappointed when WSL2 came along and just virtualized everything; fs performance took a shit. Anyway I don't care about windows these days, all Linux all the time.

ernsheong

why don't they just switch completely to Unix, lol

thot_experiment

Nice, FWIW this is currently pretty easy to solve by just keeping your stuff on a separate EXT4 volume and then mounting that under Windows. Windows accessing a mounted EXT4 volume through WSL is much faster than the other way around.

thomasswilliams

Upgraded and saw faster WSL launches straight away