Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

Some additional details from Scott Hanselman:

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/DevelopersCanRunBashShellAndUs...

"This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you - using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on. This is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me."

"This runs on 64-bit Windows and doesn't use virtual machines. Where does bash on Windows fit in to your life as a developer?

If you want to run Bash on Windows, you've historically had a few choices.

Cygwin - GNU command line utilities compiled for Win32 with great native Windows integration. But it's not Linux. HyperV and Ubuntu - Run an entire Linux VM (dedicating x gigs of RAM, and x gigs of disk) and then remote into it (RDP, VNC, ssh) Docker is also an option to run a Linux container, under a HyperV VM Running bash on Windows hits in the sweet spot. It behaves like Linux because it executes real Linux binaries. Just hit the Windows Key and type bash. "

> This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself.

How does it work without VM? I'm super curious!

Have a look at FreeBSD's linuxulator. It basically maps syscalls (and a bunch of other stuff) from one OS to another. Alexander Leidinger has written a whole lot of blog posts about it - this one's a good start: http://www.leidinger.net/blog/2010/10/27/the-freebsd-linuxul...

Is there a source for this being a syscall emulation layer and not some kind of colocation of the linux kernel in a subsystem somehow?

The latter would be much more interesting to me, since what I really want out of "running linux on my desktop" is for it to actually act like the linux machines my code is targeting, and I'm dubious that a syscall layer will achieve that to the degree I want.

One of my coworkers is from MS and worked on the Android apps on Windows project. This comes out of that cancelled work: It's a full implementation of Linux syscalls in user mode that registers a driver to perform kernel-mode tasks on behalf of the subsystem. The NT kernel has always been fairly agnostic and not tied specifically to Win32; it originally had an OS/2 text-mode and POSIX subsystem in addition to Win32. The NT kernel even uses a Unix-like "\\?\" root filesystem where disks, kernel objects, sockets, etc are mounted.

From what I can gather Microsoft is paying Canonical to help with a few user-mode bits and the Windows apt-get stuff uses the official Canonical sources.

As I said to him: "NT is the only major OS I know of that has always had personality subsystems. Cutler’s vision finally pays off after 3 decades of waiting"