Microsoft has announced the beginning of testing a system for running Linux containers on Windows, implemented based on the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) layer. The toolkit provides a standard command-line interface wslc and an API for creating, deploying, and running Linux-based containers from a Windows environment, as well as for accessing running containers from Windows. Container functionality is included in the experimental release of WSL 2.9.3.
Main features of WSLC (WSL Containers):
- Operations for managing the lifecycle of containers, such as creation, startup, stopping, exporting, cleaning up, and inspecting.
- Limiting the CPU and memory consumption of individual containers.
- Building, uploading, sending, importing, saving, and verifying system images. Commands for viewing lists of available images. Batch operations with multiple images at once. The ability to package multiple images into a single tar archive.
- Creating and managing virtual networks. Connecting containers to multiple networks. Creating custom types of networks. Network port forwarding.
- Creating, viewing, and deleting partitions. Working with virtual disks (VHD).
- Accessing the GPU from containers and providing libraries for non-privileged users to work with the GPU.
- Creating sessions as needed, assigning names to sessions, customizable storage location.
- SDK with API for automating container work from C++ and C#/WinRT applications.
- The 'wslc logs' command for viewing and extracting data from logs. Output of statistics about container operation. Syntax highlighting in the 'wslc' utility.
- Integration with MSBuild and CMake.
- Support for management via ADMX group policies.
- Support for the VS Code dev container extension for running and building developed code in a container.
In addition to container support, the new version of WSL has implemented the following features:
- A new file system 'virtiofs' has been proposed and enabled by default in containers, providing a twofold acceleration in access to Windows files.
- A 'consomme' network mode has been implemented and enabled by default in containers, ensuring improved compatibility with various network configurations.VPN, proxy, etc.). In "consomme" mode, Linux traffic is routed through Windows, allowing Linux applications to leverage all the capabilities of the Windows network environment, including security policies and tools for integration with corporate systems.
- Improved automatic return to the primary environment with Windows memory that is not used in virtual machine Linux.
WSL provides a virtual machine with a full Linux kernel (based on branches 6.6 and 6.18), in which Linux distributions can run. The kernel includes WSL-specific modifications, such as optimizations to reduce boot time and lower memory usage, the ability to return memory freed by Linux processes back to Windows, and configurations to exclude unnecessary drivers and subsystems. The system is installed in a separate disk image (VHD) with an ext4 filesystem and a virtual network adapter.
Source: opennet.ru
