
Shipping a Linux Kernel with Windows - MikusR
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/shipping-a-linux-kernel-with-windows/
======
adontz
Actually, this looks like bad news to me.

If WSL v2 is running VM under the hood, no wonder it will be Hyper-V. We
already have such lightweight VM for "Credential Guard/Device Guard" and it
already conflicts will any other hypervisor: VMWare workstation [1],
VirtualBox. Resolution is to disable Hyper-V, for instance, with command line

    
    
        bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off
    

So most probably WSL v2 will do the same, which means one cannot run WSL v2
and non Hyper-V VMs at the same time, because two different hypervisors can't
coexist.

[1]
[https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2146361](https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2146361)

~~~
tjoff
Ouch...

I guess there is no hope that one will be able to continue to use WSL v1?

~~~
dragonwriter
> I guess there is no hope that one will be able to continue to use WSL v1?

Looks like that guess is wrong:

“WSL 2 is a new version of the architecture that powers the Windows Subsystem
for Linux to run ELF64 Linux binaries on Windows. This new architecture
changes how these Linux binaries interact with Windows and your computer’s
hardware, but still provides the same user experience as in WSL 1 (the current
widely available version). Individual Linux distros can be run either as a WSL
1 distro, or as a WSL 2 distro, can be upgraded or downgraded at any time, and
you can run WSL 1 and WSL 2 distros side by side. WSL 2 uses an entirely new
architecture that uses a real Linux kernel.”

[https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-
wsl-2/](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/)

------
mrbonner
I’m debating the possibility of moving out of MacOS and just get a Windows 10
Surface device. I don’t mind the Windows UI but feel like WSL may not be
adequate for me. With this rate of change inside MS OS team, I won’t be
surprised when one day, Windows would embrace the Linux kernel and just build
the UI on top of it. Look at what the IE team does with Chromium. Somehow, I
think MS needs to cannibalize its own business (OS or browser) to set itself
for a comeback in the near future.

~~~
viraptor
If you want to move out of osx, but wsl is not good enough, then... why not
just Linux?

~~~
fcbrooklyn
can't speak for the OP, but there are several apps I wanted to run that would
have been cumbersome with that approach (although I looked at it). Main apps
in question were Excel, and Ableton Live.

~~~
seniorivn
Wine nowdays can run most apps flawlessly, same thing for wsl, so the end user
decision depends on os specific apps ratio and how bad is the windows ui for
him PS and also maybe antivirus tolerances, since there is no need for
antivirus on windows.

~~~
Sangeppato
Quite frankly, the difference here is that WSL is supported by Microsoft and
it ensures compatibility with open source tools, while Wine is all about
reverse engineering, it's not complete and every time an application gets
updated it could completely break. Furthermore, performance and direct HW
access are way more important in my DAW (where I make music and want to
eliminate every ms of latency) than in my dev environment (at least to a
certain degree).

------
dimtion
> One of the great things about Linux is its stable and backwards compatible
> system call interface. This will enable us to ship the latest stable branch
> of the Linux kernel to all versions of WSL2.

This is a very interesting phrase. Linus often appeared to be yelling at
developers not respecting the rule #1 of the kernel. However the kernel being
strictly backward compatible is a boon for Linux users, most of the industry
should be inspired by this strict policy.

Interestingly, Microsoft (compared to Google, Apple...) is the company
providing the best long term support for its products.

~~~
temac
Also interestingly, the NT kernel is not backward compatible at syscall level.
MS even had to invent quite convoluted stuff to run kind of other versions of
Windows (but not really...) in their containers, and part of the tech
(picoprocesses) was also recycled for WSL1, if I understand correctly.

So I'm really fond of that they wrote: "One of the great things about Linux is
its stable and backwards compatible system call interface." I immediately
added a big fat: "in contrast with the NT kernel" in my head :D

~~~
cpuguy83
Neither Darwin or the BSD's (though I'm no BSD expert, I could be mistaken)
have a stable system call ABI either. Linux seems to be pretty unique in this
regard.

~~~
joveian
I don't know about the others but NetBSD has had an even stronger focus on
compatability, with some people still running an old binary from NetBSD 0.9
(released in 1993). The one major exception was that the first threading
implementation was based on scheduler activations and was completely removed.

Any system that supports static binaries needs a stable system call interface
if it wants binary compatibility. IIUC, Windows never supported static
binaries.

~~~
mehrdadn
> Any system that supports static binaries needs a stable system call
> interface if it wants binary compatibility. IIUC, Windows never supported
> static binaries.

I feel like you're just playing semantics here. Windows refers to syscalls by
name rather than number (which IMO is better), so the numbers aren't the
static entities; the static entities are the names. That's static to me. I
don't see a single thing that referencing by numbers vs. names would gain you.

~~~
joveian
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic-
link_library](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic-link_library)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_library](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Static_library)

I'm not saying Windows is wrong (other systems later changed to dynmaic
linking but some still have support for static linking) it just means that you
can't replace only the kernel with a new major version and expect it to work
(another issue there is kmem grovelers which I think Linux is entirely rid of
but NetBSD isn't quite).

IIUC, most of the major issues with Windows compatability are due to
developers not following the documented system interface and directly calling
the explicitly unstable and undocumented system calls directly. Stuff that
uses the documented interface continues to work indefinitely.

The origin of the stable syscall tradition in unixy systems is not fixing the
same issues that Windows has but is due to the historic use of static
binaries.

------
lmz
Does anyone have a link to an explanation of why they moved to this approach
in WSL 2?

Edit: more info here: [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-
wsl-2/](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-wsl-2/)

~~~
tyingq
Ahh, from your link:

 _" dramatic file system performance increases, and full system call
compatibility, meaning you can run more Linux apps in WSL 2 such as Docker."_

That will be welcome. I use WSL, but it's currently very slow for anything
that touches lots of files, like a git clone, rsync, etc.

~~~
asveikau
It would be nice if they improved their own file system performance.
Sidestepping the gap by running a VM gives them less incentive to fix these
issues, which are also visible in native Windows applications.

~~~
crispinb
I agree Windows file access is noticeably slower than on other platforms. But
it seems like the issue has quite fundamental roots:
[https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...](https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425272829).
Add to that Windows Defender scanning, and you have death by a thousand cuts
rather than something that could be fixed by a single measure like adopting a
faster filesystem.

~~~
asveikau
I used to work at Microsoft doing work that touched filesystem stuff a lot,
and every single one of those points was known to me already. But at a certain
point they ought to be able to say: the OS is not competitive with the state
of the art in this area. It shouldn't matter what organizational or component
boundaries create this situation, they should do more to fix it. Blaming the
layering is a start I guess, but shouldn't be the end.

~~~
crispinb
Sure, hard to argue with that. The effects are pronounced enough even from an
end-user perspective, and it's clearly Microsoft's job to fix.

------
robertAngst
This removes the need for me to use Ubuntu Desktop or Linux Mint Desktop.

I hated dealing with the install, which often didnt work.

And getting anything to work perfect was too much work.

But I love Ubuntu Server, and the idea of being able to use linux without a
separate install changes the potential of my Laptop.

------
childintime
Ever since 2004 Microsoft holds the "Lindows" trademark [1]. Who'd thought
then that Microsoft would actually make the product a reality?

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linspire)

------
koala_man
I can't believe [http://www.mslinux.org/](http://www.mslinux.org/) is actually
happening

~~~
pjmlp
It already did, check Azure Sphere.

------
tobias3
So they painstakingly built a Linux syscall ABI into the Windows NT kernel
(including tricky stuff like fork()). Then they just abandon that approach and
run the Linux kernel in a VM/or something like user mode Linux/coLinux (
[http://www.colinux.org/](http://www.colinux.org/) ). I feel sorry for all the
wasted work in WSL1.

~~~
gsam
No, a lot of cross-platform applications are going to be using this
infrastructure IIRC still. In this case, they only need a subset of the Linux
APIs and they can optimize it to produce the right translations.

------
cogman10
I wonder how they are handling resource allocation (memory, cpu cores, etc?)

One thing that is nice about WSL is that you don't worry about any of that. Am
I going to see a 1gb block of memory reserved every time I start up an linux
terminal?

~~~
zamadatix
Hyper-V supports dynamic memory allocation. As far as the rest it can all be
shared i.e. your VM having 4 cores assigned does not mean those 4 cores are
inaccessible to everything else.

------
crispinb
The new wsl, along with VS Code's new remote development extension, could make
Windows an interesting beast with two identities: a primary host for regular
business and consumer software, and a linux client for development.

I did use Windows & wsl for development for much of 2018, and (coming from a
mac) found it surprisingly usable. The separate filesystem hierarchies was a
bit of a pest, and I reverted to Linux for the first time in some years. But
that has plenty of its own annoyances, and I'll be interested to check out wsl
2.

~~~
newen
Yep, I had been using WSL for most of my programming last year too, and I
found it to be pretty decent. I switched to my dual boot Linux recently
because I couldn't use the GPU via WSL. But if this lets me use the GPU, then
I won't need to have a separate Linux install anymore, which would be pretty
convenient.

------
X6S1x6Okd1st
2019 is the year of desktop linux on windows?

~~~
tareqak
So 2019 is going to be the year if the Linux desktop, and it's going to be
brought to the world by Microsoft? Just when I thought this timeline couldn't
get any weirder.

I personally think that this is a good thing in the short-term for both Linux
users and Windows users in that it gives both platforms a sort of kick in the
pants each to deal with one platform's deficiency by incorporating the other's
strength. I _could_ speculate about where this all could go wrong long-term,
but that is basically a future resurgence of embrace-extend-extinguish, which
anyone here can look up. What is important now is that people voted with their
time, their wallets, and their voices to give Microsoft a strong enough signal
to invest their future product development around. These people include Linux
users, Linux developers (kernel and userspace), Windows users, and Microsoft
itself and all of them deserve some amount of gratitude for getting us here
today so thank you.

To be completely honest, the only way this news could be any better in my eyes
was that if Microsoft also committed to being 100% privacy-focused and removed
any and all telemetry from Windows, but I guess the four groups of people I
laid out previously did not want that level of privacy just as badly.

~~~
zeusk
> To be completely honest, the only way this news could be any better in my
> eyes was that if Microsoft also committed to being 100% privacy-focused and
> removed any and all telemetry from Windows.

As much as I'm also privacy minded, I do support telemetry in software (not
the kind that touches my data) but if the developers can get traces of how
people actually interact with their product and what happened when their
product did crash - it helps a LOT, not only technically but also to shift
management's focus onto an issue.

What do you have against telemetry in software? (again, not the kind that saps
your data for gains).

~~~
tareqak
I don't have anything against the good kind of telemetry in software provided
that you can demonstrate to both non-technical and technical users that it is
not the bad kind of telemetry with extremely high confidence.

------
just_myles
Been using WSL since I switched to a Windows shop and it's a good lightweight
alternative. I don't run a lot of the big tasks that I used to but, it's nice
to have.

Installing certain apps do tend to be on the slow side so if WSLv2 can resolve
this, that would be great news. As for the implementation is concerned, I have
no idea what they are talking about.

------
sneakernets
We've gone from "Linux is a cancer" to "This is an exciting day for all of us
on the Linux team at Microsoft" in just one generation.

Good. I hope this trend continues.

~~~
jgoerzen
Translation: "Linux is eating our lunch. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em."

Linux has already thoroughly trounced Windows in mobile (Android). It's done
so in the web space. MS still has a strong foothold in enterprise, but it
doesn't take a genius to see Linux continuing to expand on at least the
backend in enterprise as well.

With more apps being delivered over the web, and web browsers being cross-
platform, the desktop choice becomes less OS-centric for rote workers.

I can see this as Microsoft looking into a future where they lose relevance
because of ChromeOS eating up the low end and MacOS eating up the high end,
and they're left with institutional traction. Which they can coast on for many
years, but not forever.

------
ericfrederich
WSL used to have very good blog posts and videos explaining the workings of
WSL. There haven't been any updates in a while, this is disappointing.

~~~
xxpor
Based on the fact that this seems like a complete change in implementation, I
would have to assume that there just wasn't much to write about because people
would be focused on 2.

------
tybit
Last time I used WSL it wasn’t recommended to work with your local window
files and my WSL work was an island from the rest of my machine.

I wonder if they will be able to bridge that gap? I think I could be a happy
windows user if I never had to touch PowerShell again.

~~~
WorldMaker
It was always fine to work with your Windows files via /mnt/$driveletter/…

Recent releases of WSL now let you access Linux files that are inside the
distro from Windows using a special filesystem driver and magic path
(\\\wsl$\…)

------
lenkite
I hope it will be possible to run docker seamlessly without a virtual machine
and lots of extra setup once this ships. That will be a big advantage over
MacOS where you need to run a fat VM that gobbles your memory and takes time
to start-up.

~~~
gfiorav
Use the Windows docker as a server and have your WSL/Linux client connect to
it through local [https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/setting-up-docker-for-
windows...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/setting-up-docker-for-windows-and-
wsl-to-work-flawlessly)

~~~
lenkite
Already know about this: this still means a big VM eating up memory

------
Ericson2314
Hopefully they are hoping for something like user-mode linux (UML) / libos /
unikernel Linux (UKL) to save them so there work on wsl1 wasn't for nothing
_and_ they can stay off the syscall treadmill.

------
cryptonector
The Linux ABI won.

Emulating the Linux ABI is difficult (because it's full of crap).

At some point you get tired of emulating the garbage -- it's a large,
underdocumented, and fairly fast moving target.

Next step: reverse this and make Windows run on Linux.

~~~
Someone1234
Alternatively just have Windows and Linux run side by side on a generic
hypervisor. Then allow them to each render other virtual machines as an
"application."

You can already do 90% of this. Only thing missing is allowing virtual
machines to call up to the hypervisor to get a hook/render into sister
machines.

~~~
the8472
about rendering into other machines:
[https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass](https://github.com/gnif/LookingGlass)

~~~
zeusk
Not exactly consumer stuff, but Microsoft has had similar capability to
support hot-pluggable GPUs and USB display adapters - Indirect Displays.

[https://github.com/kfroe/IndirectDisplay](https://github.com/kfroe/IndirectDisplay)

It basically allows you to create a D3D device that delegates it's rendering
to another D3D device in the system, and then the output surface can be either
dealt with in software (CPU acts as protocol encoder), in hardware (ie.
videnc/dec block + PHY hooked over USB/PCIe) or just memory mapped to host OS.

------
petters
Is this legal? It obviously is, but how? I thought the GPL would require
Microsoft to ship the Windows source code? I suppose it counts as a separate
component.

~~~
leeter
My guess? Because they aren't linking to it.

Longer guess: I suspect they are doing some fancy virtualization tricks here
to service calls directly like they would a VM but in a VERY lightweight
manner similar to containers. This fits with other announcements concerning
containers that were also made today.

Again this is all supposition without any actual knowledge.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's a trick the separation kernels and micro-hypervisors (esp OKL4) were
advertising years ago:

[http://linuxdevices.org/using-a-hypervisor-to-reconcile-
gpl-...](http://linuxdevices.org/using-a-hypervisor-to-reconcile-gpl-and-
proprietary-embedded-code/)

Such tricks are one of the reasons I support stronger copyleft like License
Zero's Parity. Otherwise, they just loophole their way out of stuff.

------
october_sky
I can't help but think that this is 10 years too late. I gave up on Windows a
long time ago, as did many people I know. I know there are folks who find this
valuable, but I think Microsoft is chasing a pool of power users that has been
consistently shrinking year-over-year. With that said, perhaps the pool will
get bigger as it exposes users to the power of command line :-)

~~~
munchbunny
_With that said, perhaps the pool will get bigger as it exposes users to the
power of command line :-)_

Not sure what you mean. Windows has been using PowerShell for almost a decade
now as the Bash equivalent "everything at your fingertips" command line tool.

Personal opinion, in many ways PowerShell is more powerful than Bash. It's
more verbose, but it's also easier to script.

~~~
astine
While Powershell is pretty great and I use it all the time, I still think it
falls short of Bash in terms of how integrated it is with the rest of the
system. The shell is the default way to get things done in Linux but it feels
more like a second-class citizen in Windows. This is a shame because there is
clearly a lot of good engineering in PoSH.

~~~
majkinetor
Nah, integrations to the system are orders of magnitude better then bash.
Powreshell is automation standard for basically all MS tools and tools of many
other big companies. You can host powershell in your app with 5 lines of code
(not something you can easily do with bash).

Its designed to be integrated into everything. When my sysadmin GUI clicks
vmWare I open PowerCLI. When my db admin uses networker for backup I use Sql
Server Powershell Module. When my web dude clicks in IIS management studio and
forgets the click I give him unmistakable ps1 script that crates IIS site and
sets it up in 5 lines of code. Its like that forever.

Poweshell is no typical shell - u do business stuff in it, not text parsing
all the time like in bash with 0.1% of what you actually want to do.

The thing that i personally miss is exporting config of Windows (control panel
and friends) as powershell script(s). Something like DSC (or better,
BoxStarter) but for grannies - press Start -> export everything to powershell
script -> reinstall -> run ps1 -> run chocolatey -> show FTW sign.

~~~
astine
" _Its designed to be integrated into everything._ "

But it isn't. Try managing AD servers using powershell. You have two options.
Either the powershell AD module, which is incomplete and doesn't cover the
entirety of Active Directory, or you resort to the native .Net API which is
ugly and unintuitive when used from a command line.

" _When my db admin uses networker for backup I use Sql Server Powershell
Module._ "

Wut? Don't do this. I've used that module and it's fragile as hell. You have
to check the arity of your select statements for it to work correctly. I built
a data importation integration using it once and once I got tired of it
breaking I just caved and rewrote the tool in C# and never had any more
trouble.

But none of that's what I'm talking about when I say that it feels like a
second class citizen. If you're on a Unixy machine, every tool implicitly runs
from within a shell. That means the shell is always available, even from an
application. Not so with Windows. In Windows, the .NET API is your world ( or
if you're unlucky, the Win32 API) on Linux, it's the shell.

It's kind of in this sense that Powershell isn't really a shell in the sense
that Bash is the primary interface to the operating system whereas Powershell
is just _an_ interface layered onto other interfaces. I've done enough
sysadmin type work in either environment to feel the difference. Powershell is
less a primary interface with the system and more a scripting language. As a
scripting language, it's pretty fine, I have no complaints about the design.
I'd like to think it's pretty close to what I would have come up with had I
been tasked to design a CLI for Windows in the mid 2000s, but it doesn't
underly the system as deeply as the Unix shells do.

Edit:

For an great concrete example, compare Cron with the Windows Task Scheduler.
With Cron, the command language is whatever your shell happens to be. You have
a string which specifies the schedule, followed by some shell command which
does your task. The shell command can launch a program, start another script,
or you might be able to contain it all in the single line. On Windows, you
provide the exact path to the program you want to launch and any arguments.
That's it. Powershell isn't available. If you want to launch a PoSH script,
you have to reference the PoSH executable and provide your script as an
argument. It's relatively ugly.

One nice thing about the Cron approach, is that you can provide input
redirection for ad-hoc logging or even output suppression, without having to
modify your executable. It's a lot more steps to do the same thing on Windows.

~~~
majkinetor
Lets not dive into details here.

I know that Sql Server module sux (MS guys I worked with told me that Sql team
didn't quite get it), especially when it automatically changes drive to
virtual one upon loading.

But it works, once you know the quirks, or you can find alternative (number of
them).

> If you're on a Unixy machine, every tool implicitly runs from within a
> shell.

Run Windows Core or Nano server and you have the same thing. Run X Windows and
you have th same thing on Linux as on Windows.

> Either the powershell AD module, which is incomplete and doesn't cover the
> entirety of Active Directory, or you resort to the native .Net API which is
> ugly and unintuitive when used from a command line.

Many cmdlets are incomplete. Why do you think Linux CLI tools are complete ?
Anyway, without any IDE and with just Notepad knowing a bit of .NET you could
create yoru own functions where it isn't enough. I do it all the time, here is
one link:
[https://github.com/majkinetor/posh](https://github.com/majkinetor/posh)

About ugliness, my God bash is ugly. The code is so ugly that it hurts. I
don't even have to translate the C# code in Powershell if I don't want, I can
just compile it and execute it from the string from Powershell. Dropping to
.NET was never ment to be used on command line - wrap it into nice sugarry
function/module.

> For an great concrete example, compare Cron with the Windows Task Scheduler.

Great example, because I like Cron and I hate WTS. The problem is the syntax -
cron syntax is easy to learn and remember. WTS can't be specified that easyly,
in any case you need to click, use XML, use ughly CLI tools, or incomplete
Task Scheduler cmdlets. Also, WTS is full of quirks.

Yeah, typical way is 'here is exe, run it, thats it' or 'powershell
-Command/-File' or 'cmd.exe -C ...' (as is with many other linux tools, cron
excluded).

Its easy enough to create scripts, for instance this is my replacement for
Startup folder:

[https://github.com/majkinetor/posh/blob/master/MM_Admin/Regi...](https://github.com/majkinetor/posh/blob/master/MM_Admin/Register-
LoginTask.ps1)

But there is something more in line with your desires - PowerShell Scheduled
Jobs (not Tasks, Jobs) which work as you want it - Powershell itslef manages
scheduling.

~~~
astine
" _Run X Windows and you have the same thing on Linux as on Windows._ "

No you don't. X Windows is still run from a shell. The Windows GUI, by
contrast, is not. Any application run in Linux or Solaris or whatever can drop
down to the shell. And if I run an application from a terminal, I can take
advantage of that. Not so with Windows.

" _Anyway, without any IDE and with just Notepad knowing a bit of .NET you
could create yoru own functions where it isn 't enough._"

I've written PoSH modules before. I'm pretty familiar with the process. I
don't know what point you're trying to make.

" _Why do you think Linux CLI tools are complete ?_ "

Because in the Unix environment, the CLI tools have been the primary admin
interface for the past 40+ years. In Linux, the CLI comes first and the GUI is
an afterthought. In Windows, it's the other way around. If you think that's
changing, great. But I work on Windows in my day to day work, and regularly
write Powershell so I've got a good feel for the difference.

------
loudmax
Next, please provide a Windows kernel for Linux or other open source operating
systems. There are many of us whose biggest frustration running an open source
OS is working around Windows executables, Windows only drivers, and Microsoft
proprietary file formats.

------
viraptor
So this sound like the CPU usage will be quite a bit higher than with wsl1,
since it's actually running a VM. Kind of like Docker on Mac. It's not a huge
issue, but it still takes some battery life away.

~~~
cpuguy83
VM does not mean extra CPU usage. Since there is no emulation involved
(assuming VT-x is supported) you should be getting native or mostly native
performance.... not to say that WSL2 will be better on CPU usage, however I
don't think one should assume that it will be worse.

This is opposed to WSL1 which is emulation and has extra layers to go through.

~~~
viraptor
Unless they completely stripped all background tasks, there's still a few
wakeup calls from the VM. I didn't mean the execution overhead from emulation.

For example hyperkit.docker not running any container does ~90 wakeups/s on my
machine. This comes mainly from just keeping the VM alive. This also prevents
deeper sleep for CPUs.

------
wtdata
So, will it be possible to get GPU access (CUDA) directly from whiting WSL
now?

~~~
zeusk
If you're running a Quadro, maybe. Otherwise Nvidia is quite strict against
running their drivers for GTX/RTX inside any kind of virtual environment.

------
Osiris
Does this mean that we'll be able to mount EXT4 devices and use storage as
block devices? I'd love to be able to use `ddrescue` without having to boot
into Linux.

------
sys_64738
If it's a VM running the kernel then why not simply run Virtual Box or Hyper-V
and be done with it?

------
pooya13
Will this make it possible to add OpenCL & CUDA GPU support?

------
KeenFox
Windows Subsystem for Linux 2: ELFectric Boogaloo

------
781
How does this true Linux Kernel talk with the rest of Windows? How does it
access the Windows file system?

~~~
yodon
The same way the current implementation does. The news here is not that
Windows can run Linux natively, that's been true since 2016.

~~~
781
The current implementation is a shim over the NT kernel. This new one is a
true Linux kernel.

~~~
alkonaut
Perhaps more interesting then is how the true Linux Kernel works with NTFS
without paying the tax that usually comes with the fancy NTFS features

~~~
resoluteteeth
It's obviously not mounting the NTFS filesystem directly, since it's already
in use by Windows, so this is irrelevant to how NTFS is normally mounted in
linux.

