The Windows Subsystem for Linux Is Now Open Source
Microsoft today announced that it is open sourcing the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which developers have been requesting for a long time.
At its annual Build developer conference, Microsoft today announced that it is open sourcing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), which allows developers to easily run Linux distributions inside of Windows.
“We want Windows to be a great dev box,” Pavan Davuluri, the corporate VP at Microsoft in charge of Windows and devices, told me. “At the end of the day, a good dev box means a variety of different things. One of them has been just having great WSL performance and capabilities, so that it is a one-stop shop for our developers to live in the Windows-native experience and to be able to take advantage of all of what they need in Linux.”
Developers can now download the code, build the WSL from source, and contribute features and bug fixes.
The first version of the WSL launched in 2016. At the time, Windows essentially emulated a Linux kernel (using lxcore.sys and lxss.sys), but with the launch of WSL 2 in 2019, the team switched to the Linux kernel itself to offer better compatibility. Since then, WSL added support for GPUs, graphical applications, and support for systemd.
