The Heavy Element Forum

Shipping a Linux kernel with Windows

MariusElvenwood

Microsoft has announced in a blog post that they will be releasing a version of the Linux kernel in the Windows Insider Preview this summer. It looks like it's underpinning Windows Susbsystem for Linux.
I'd like to know what everyone thinks of this.

Kocytean

Apparently it wont be released for at least another 6 months and will be based on kernel 4.19 - will it even be all that relevant by then?

Lazy_Irish_Dude

Kocytean As far as I know 4.19 is an LTS Kernel. Debian 10 and likely also RHEL 8 will be shipping it for quite some time, so if Microsoft want to ship a Linux kernel they may as well follow the lead of two heaviest hitters in the GNU world.

MariusElvenwood

Oh cool, someone made a video talking about Linux kernel on Windows. He's pretty good, I highly recommend his other videos too.

Axiom

MariusElvenwood I'm watching the video. Microsoft had Open Sourced some programs but the catch is it's not readily able to compile for Linux. You can get the source but you'd have to put in a lot of time and effort to not use it on Windows which is not beneficial to end users. I'd suspect that Microsoft will reject Github contributions to allow their programs to run outside of Windows.

There's a big cost involved with Microsoft allowing more Linux programs to run on Windows. You have to bear the cost of Microsoft's business practices! I'm getting very tempted to write about Microsoft's past practices to give context to their current business decisions.

Deblad

But Microsoft owns GitHub now, so there is no way that they're gonna reject GitHub contributions. Also, I want to get in on this so I can figure out some more. I own an OEM copy of Microsoft Windows that came with my laptop so I recently reinstalled it alongside Manjaro because I thought, "Why not?". So along that same vein, I have enabled developer mode and registered it for Insider Previews for this very reason.

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