Re: Windows Subsystem for FreeBSD?

I've used it quite a bit on Windows since the early days.

In WSL v1 it was pretty much what linuxolator is in FreeBSD, it was just
emulation and translation of syscalls from linux to windows and it was
mostly limited in the same way linux emulation is on FreeBSD in fact GUI
wise I'de say it was much more limited since i.e one could not run GUI
Linux apps on Windows or call Windows GUI apps on WSL, you couldn't even
run services that require a network layer, like nginx mysql etc.

However, it has evolved since and with WSL2 all of the above is possible,
this is because they are using an approach similar to how docker runs on
macOS, it's a lightweith Linux VM running the linux kernel, no need for
syscall translation.

I'm not sure if you mean bring this to FreeBSD as in Linux Subsystem as
implemented here to FreeBSD or have WSL also run FreeBSD not just Linux.

But the latter makes no sense, this would need to be done by Microsoft and
I'm not quite sure if there's any advantage to them.

However, if you mean to achieve the same level of linux compatibility, that
would be quite interesting, I think linux emulation was always a great
thing on FreeBSD but it was always limited in the same ways as WSL1.


One of the advantage of having something like this might be finally getting
docker on a FreeBSD host. This is after all how it works on macOS, and on
recent versions its actually using apple's lightweight hypervisor aka
"hypervisor.framework". And of course it would allow FreeBSD desktop users
to run some software that only works on Linux but without the limitations
of not being able to handle all miscalls.