>and I’m almost certain that when you run multiple wsl distros they are all in one VM, though that may be wrong

Yes, they run as containers.

From https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/1573#issuecommen...:

WSL distributions (instances) are not VMs. They are best described as "containers" running inside the WSL2 VM. Each WSL2 distribution/instance has its own isolated:

PID namespace Mount namespace User namespace (I believe) Cgroup namespace (And probably) IPC and UTS namespaces WSLg System Distribution (Windows 11 only) init process However, they all share the parent VM's:

Network namespace Device tree (other than /dev/pts) CPU/Kernel/Memory/Swap (obviously) /init binary (and some other binaries that are injected in)