Microsoft announced the completion of testing the second version of the executable file launching subsystem in the Windows environment WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux). It will be officially available in the April update Windows 10 2004 (20 year 04 month).
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) - a subsystem of the Windows 10 operating system designed to run executable files from Linux environment. The WSL subsystem is only available on 64-bit editions of Windows 10 and can be activated on versions of Windows 10 Anniversary Update and later. WSL was first introduced in the Insider Preview of Windows 10 build 14316. Microsoft positions WSL primarily as a tool for developers, web -developers and those who work on or with open source applications.
The new version will use a full kernel instead of an emulator Linux 4.19, which will translate Linux application requests into Windows system calls on the fly. It is worth noting that the Linux kernel will not be included in the installation image of the system, but will be supplied separately and supported by Microsoft, just as device drivers are now supported during automatic system updates. To install it, you can use standard tools Windows Update.
Specific patches have been introduced into the kernel, which include optimizations to reduce startup time, reduce memory consumption, return Windows to memory freed by Linux processes, and leave the minimum required set of drivers and subsystems in the kernel.
When the subsystem starts, a separate virtual disk in VHD format with a virtual network adapter will be used. To install a subsystem, you can select a “base” on which it will be based. The following distributions are currently presented in the Windows Store as such bases: Ubuntu, Debian GNU/Linux, Kali Linux, Fedora, Alpine, SUSE and openSUSE.
Source: linux.org.ru