Microsoft has introduced an open package, Microsoft-Performance-Tools, for performance analysis and diagnosis of performance-related issues on Linux and Android platforms. It offers a set of command-line utilities for analyzing system-wide performance and profiling individual applications. The code is written in C# using the .NET Core platform and is distributed under the MIT license.
Subsystems such as LTTng, perf, and Perfetto can be utilized as sources for tracking system activity and profiling applications. LTTng allows for assessing the task scheduler's performance, tracking process activity, analyzing system calls, input/output, and file system events. Perf is used to evaluate CPU load. Perfetto can be used to analyze performance on Android and browsers based on the Chromium engine, enabling the assessment of the task scheduler's performance, evaluation of CPU and GPU load, application of FTrace, and tracing of typical events.
The toolkit can also extract information from logs in dmesg, Cloud-Init, and WaLinuxAgent (Azure Linux Guest Agent) formats. For visual analysis of traces using graphs, integration with the Windows Performance Analyzer graphical interface is supported, which is available only for Windows.
Notably, in Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22518, the ability to install the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) environment as an application available through the Microsoft Store has been introduced. From a technological standpoint, the backend of WSL remains unchanged; only the installation and update method has changed (WSL for Windows 11 is not built into the system image). It is claimed that distribution through the Microsoft Store will speed up the delivery of updates and new capabilities for WSL, allowing new versions of WSL to be installed without being tied to Windows versions. For example, once experimental features such as support for graphical Linux applications, GPU computing, and disk mounting are ready, users will be able to access them immediately, without needing to update Windows or use Windows Insider test builds.
It is important to remember that in the modern WSL environment, which allows the execution of Linux executable files, instead of an emulator that translated Linux system calls into Windows system calls, a full Linux kernel environment is used. The proposed kernel for WSL is based on the Linux kernel 5.10 release, which is enhanced with WSL-specific patches that include optimizations to reduce kernel boot time, lower memory consumption, return memory freed by Linux processes back to Windows, and keep the minimal necessary set of drivers and subsystems in the kernel.
The kernel runs in a Windows environment using a virtual machine already utilized in Azure. The WSL environment operates in a separate disk image (VHD) with an ext4 file system and a virtual network adapter. User space components are installed separately and are based on builds from various distributions. For example, in the Microsoft Store, builds of Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, Kali Linux, Fedora, Alpine, SUSE, and openSUSE are available for installation in WSL.
Source: opennet.ru
