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Comment by jtvjan | Hacker News Reader

Now all that's left is for Microsoft to add EXT support to NT.

Since they've went the way of having WSL2 physical mounts show up in \wsl$ this summer I don't think there is much push for native <pick your FS> support.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/access-linux-file...

Would definitely be cool but Linux supporting NTFS only makes it even less necessary on top of that.

I hadn’t considered how this being in the upstream kernel would make it possible to run my WSL2 on NTFS natively. That’s pretty cool. I’m sure there’s still some stuff to figure out, but still pretty awesome.

Doesn't WSL2 already have the ability to read NTFS somehow? Isnt this just an optimization?

It’s a network mount. Hence it’s “don’t use it cause it’s shitty” reputation.

Well you could do that too but you'd lose permissions between the two (NTFS supports POSIX permissions but Linux doesn't and vice versa with Windows permissions).

The blog post is really about making any Linux mountable FS available to the Windows side of WSL2 without NT needing to support it. E.g. it doesn't matter if the drive is NTFS or Ext4 or BobYourUncleFS as long as the Linux kernel can mount the FS you can mount it in WSL2 and access it from Windows without NT needing to support the OS. It also already works in reverse, volumes mounted in Windows (including NTFS) can also be shared with WSL2.

It's really just their integrated-into-the-OS version of VM guest filesystem sharing.

What's the point, though? You still can't have two kernels accessing the same filesystem directly, so if you give direct access to Linux in WSL, Windows loses it.

You can only mount entire physical disks under WSL2 though, as opposed to single partitions, which makes it a showstopper depending on your layout. (Common single disk configurations like a laptop/ultrabook come to mind)

There are third party tools to read from Ext partitions, but unfortunately, writing to the filesystem seems to be a footgun roulette situation.

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