Windows 10 will soon ship with a full, open source, GPLed Linux kernel

'Earlier today, we wrote that Microsoft was going to add some big new
features to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, including native support
for Docker containers. It turns out that that ain't the half of it.

The current Windows Subsystem for Linux uses a Microsoft-authored
kernel component that provided the same kernel API as the Linux kernel
but written from scratch by Microsoft. Essentially, it translated from
Linux APIs to Windows NT kernel APIs. That worked pretty well, but the
current subsystem had a few shortcomings: there was no ability to use
Linux drivers, in particular file system drivers. Its file system
performance, layered on top of Windows' own NTFS, was often 20 times
slower than a real Linux kernel. It was also a relatively old version
of the kernel; it offered approximately the set of APIs that Linux 4.4
did, and that was released in 2016. Some APIs aren't implemented at
all, and others are only partially implemented to meet the needs of
specific applications.

All is changing with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. Instead of
emulating the Linux kernel APIs on the NT kernel, WSL 2 is going to
run a full Linux kernel in a lightweight virtual machine. This kernel
will be trimmed down and tailored to this particular use case, with
stripped-down hardware support (since it will defer to the host
Windows OS for that) and faster booting.'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/windows-10-will-soon-ship-with-a-full-open-source-gpled-linux-kernel/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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