Windows Subsystem for Linux Architectural Overview

The Drawbridge[1] stuff is pretty interesting looking. I really wish MS would ship a simple sandboxing solution, so I can run arbitrary binaries and restrict them. The new Metro app stuff is cute, but doesn&#x27;t help with the millions of existing binaries. Nor does it seem very user-friendly or useful, for that matter.<p>1: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;projects&#x2F;drawbridge&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.microsoft.com&#x2F;en-us&#x2F;projects&#x2F;drawbridge&#x2F;</a>

This is fascinating :-) I was wondering if they leveraged their environment subsystem framework - nice to have this confirmed!<p>A long time ago I wrote the Wikipedia article on the architecture of Windows NT. It obviously needs an update, but I think it&#x27;s still quite relevant and explains in a vastly simplified manner how Windows Fitz together.<p>It can be found here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Architecture_of_Windows_NT" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Architecture_of_Windows_NT</a><p>There is a block diagram that I think is also helpful:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Architecture_of_Windows_NT#&#x2F;media&#x2F;File%3AWindows_2000_architecture.svg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Architecture_of_Windows_NT#&#x2F;...</a>

It&#x27;s interesting that this was enabled by the Drawbridge work. I was somewhat under the impression that Drawbridge was dead and&#x2F;or superseded by other container-related projects. It&#x27;s often weirdly hard to find out what&#x27;s going on with some particular Microsoft project or technology, even for those of us who are employees. I was pretty excited about Drawbridge ~3 years ago when I was working with it but it subsequently seemed to have vanished.

I cannot stop thinking that soon they will announce a native implementation of Docker on top of all that.

So, its kind of LINE for Windows like WINE for Linux.

While this is an interesting technical overview, could anyone give me an idea of how to reinstall lxrun? The blasted thing doesn&#x27;t work for me anymore and there&#x27;s basically no documentation on how to fix it other than reinstalling Windows 10. Yes, I&#x27;ve tried lxrun &#x2F;uninstall &#x2F;full followed by lxrun &#x2F;install.<p>Edit: in fact, I think the problem with my installation has to deal with Windows&#x27; NTFS not natively being capable of understanding the lxss file attributes...

&gt; The primary role of SUA was to encourage applications to get ported to Windows without significant rewrites.<p>Is this a supported use of the Linux subsystem?<p>Running native Linux apps directly is great if it works but there are going to be cases where the app would 99% work except for that one thing Linux has and the Linux subsystem doesn&#x27;t. Maybe Microsoft doesn&#x27;t provide a tun&#x2F;tap driver so you need to use TAP-Windows.<p>It would be convenient to be able to change only that without having to worry about the subtle differences in the Windows version of inet_ntop() and the call to make a socket non-blocking and that Unicode on Windows is UTF-16 instead of UTF-8 and so on.

So `fork` is still expensive?

Does this enable running Docker containers of Linux things in Windows? Would that enable an improvement on Docker&#x27;s VirtualBox workaround?

I tried to use bash on my windows machine... signed up for insider preview etc.<p>My machine consistently states a restart will force an update that will allow me to use bash, but it doesn&#x27;t happen.<p>I gave up and went back to my ubuntu.