Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8n4vidtmkvmk | Hacker News Reader

I still run WSL1. Perf on WSL2 was still horrible if your files are under Windows last I checked.

but filesystem perf on WSL1 is horrible in general. Windows is much, much slower at touching a bunch of files than Linux, due to the filesystem filter driver architecture and NT's deep understanding of paths, the way NT does file locking, etc. it's night and day if you ever have to deal with something like a giant npm project or a huge git repo.

WSL2 is much faster on files that live inside it. I haven't found the 9P bridge to Windows to be too slow.

honestly, I don't know why they couldn't bypass the FS filter stack or something for WSL1.

(disclaimer: I work at MS, but not on WSL.)

They said Dev Drive supports bypassing most of the FS filter stack, and it somewhat makes sense that it is easier to bypass the stack at the drive level than the folder level (WSL1 was using folders deep in %LocalAppData%).

I'm very curious what WSL1 performance sitting on top of Dev Drive will be like. I have no idea yet if that's even an expected to be supported scenario. (In further curiosity with a few quick searches: no direct mention of it in the Dev Home repo, the only WSL-related issues they seem to be currently tracking are installing Repos to WSL paths from Dev Home. I don't see anything on automating installing WSL[1] distros to Dev Drive.)

I did try WSL2 on a new machine, and it does indeed seem pretty fast even on this dinky laptop, but then working on those files with JetBrains tools (PhpStorm) is a bit of an issue. It looks like they've added some support for it now, but I think it's running the IDE under Linux and then forwarding the GUI or I don't know what, but it adds a bit of latency on the IDE side instead. So I lose one way or the other.

On a fresh install I first setup WSL1, duplicated it and then converted the other one to WSL2. I don't really use the WSL1 one much, but it's nice whenever I need touch files "in Windows".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com