Cooperative Linux – running Linux as a Windows driver (2011)

I used colinux as part of my personal plan to migrate away from Windows back in ~2005-2006.<p>I wanted the transition to be as painless as possible, and I also wanted to be able to use both system at the same time for a while while getting used to Linux &amp; its applications.<p>First step was starting to use multiplatform &amp; open applications. So I left IE, Outlook and Office for the windows verdions of Firefox, Thunderbird and Open Office.<p>Once I got accustomed to that, I installed Debian in dual boot and moved all my files to ReiserFS. This was before the unfortunate events involving its creator: eventually I moved to ext4 and years later I made a <i>super cool</i> in-place conversion to btrfs, but that&#x27;s another story).<p>Now I was accustomed to open applications, and my data was on Linux, but I still found myself frequently needing to start windows for a lot of reasons. But then all my emails and documents were locked in the Linux partition.<p>Here colinix came to the rescue: while on windows, I started a colinux instance (it was super fast, no way a VM could have served that purpose), mounted the physical partition in it, and shared to the windows machine via Samba.<p>It was a long journey, but taught my younger self a lot, and above all grew me fond of how powerful and flexible an open software ecosystem can be. Nothing of that would have been possible on proprietary technologies.<p>Many years later, I have never looked back, and I grateful to all the wonderful passionate people that made this possible.

I&#x27;m the original author of this project. It warms the heart to see that it helped so many fellow hackers to introduce themselves to Linux!<p>Recalling this, it makes me feel quite a old hack, when I started this back in December 2003, without Git, through mailing lists, and on sourceforge - oh boy. Would have definitely been easier maintaining this project with all the tech, the reach, and the amount of potential contributors that we have today.

I remember running this (way earlier than 2011, like 2003?) and it was really cool but it’d slow down the real time clock on the ‘host’ (co-habitating?) Windows install. I figured that was due to the clock being tied to cpu cycles and Linux stealing some of those. I’m not so sure about that explanation anymore, but I don’t have a better hypothesis either. Funny how that little detail stuck with me for almost 20 years…

Little trivia: There has been an official UNIX subsystem in Windows since 2000: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Services_for_UNIX" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Windows_Services_for_UNIX</a> It was a company called Interix, and I believe it was not maintained for a long time (but continued to ship). IIRC the reason it was there was to satisfy DoD contracts or something similar, that required a POSIX-compliance.

I used to use this in the days of XP. It was an amazing way to learn Linux without losing Windows for me. I was sad when I had to move on without it due to the limitations of 32bit and 4GB of RAM (of which I could only actually use 3.2GB of at the time). Strange that this abandoned relic of a time long past showed up here in HN.

Some mandatory mentions:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MkLinux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MkLinux</a> - linux on top of the mach microkernel, I think it was sponsored by Apple (especially its book was great)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;L4Linux" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;L4Linux</a>

Reading through the FAQ, looks like the kernel can run on 1 physical core and SMT&#x2F;hyperthreading isn&#x27;t enabled (maybe that&#x27;s changed).<p>Seems cute but the WSL has the full support of the Windows scheduler which is gonna make the practical choice of tool obvious for folks with Linux workload requirements.

It&#x27;s a shame the 64-bit port was never completed. WSL might never have needed to happen, although I confide it would have happened anyway.

I used this to stay sane at my first dev job at IBM--we were allowed to &quot;use Linux&quot; but most of the required software wouldn&#x27;t run. Colinux to the rescue!

I loved coLinux! Was super simple to set up and way less overhead than a VM.<p>People talk a lot about WSL2 as if it&#x27;s &quot;already here&quot;, but WSL2 still requires the latest update of Windows 10 from two months ago, or a slightly older build along with an &quot;insider preview&quot; activated copy of Windows, <i>and</i> you have to enable Hyper-V. Not all devices&#x2F;users will be able to support all of this and it will break compatibility with some apps.<p>Given that, your other option is WSL1, which is not really a replacement. If you want to run Docker on it, you either have to install Docker for Windows (which may also have conflicts with Hyper-V apps) or use the oldest stable version of Docker on Linux along with some annoying hacks to be able to run a container. All of this, and you finally run some apps, and it feels like half your system&#x27;s performance is gone, and the apps run at about 1&#x2F;5th their normal speed.<p>Maybe in a year most people will be on the right build of Windows for WSL2, and maybe we&#x27;ll have patched all the Hyper-V conflicting apps, and maybe there&#x27;ll be a way to use it without a long HOWTO and researching buggy commands. Until then, a VM is way easier, more functional, faster, and more reliable.

&gt;&quot;How does it work<p>Unlike in other Linux virtualization solutions such as User Mode Linux (or the forementioned VMware), special driver software on the host operating system is used to execute the coLinux kernel in a privileged mode (known as ring 0 or supervisor mode).<p>By constantly switching the machine&#x27;s state between the host OS state and and the coLinux kernel state, coLinux is given full control of the physical machine&#x27;s MMU (i.e, paging and protection) in its own specially allocated address space, and is able to act just like a native kernel, achieving almost the same performance and functionality that can be expected from a regular Linux which could have ran on the same machine standalone.&quot;<p>This sounds great and is a noteworthy achievement!<p>Favorited.<p>Although (<i>and this is just me geeking out here, and doing some imaginary future engineering in my mind!</i>), wouldn&#x27;t it be great if someone modified both Linux and Windows -- to use a common, neutral, small-as-possible microkernel?<p>You know, take out the common stuff that both of them do, and put all of that into a microkernel, then change them so they can happily run alongside one another, supported by that microkernel at the center?<p>Note to future self (when I have the time): Look into doing this... what would be learned about microkernels and microkernel design -- if someone went down this path?<p>(Yes, I know about Mach and other microkernels... maybe the job would be fitting Linux and other OS&#x27;s to an existing microkernel... that would certainly be easier than generating the microkernel from scratch -- but not as educational...&lt;g&gt;)

I used it for many years up to the end of 2008. Then I realized that I was using only software also available on Linux and I installed Ubuntu 8.04 with Windows in VirtualBox (IE was important back in the time.)<p>Colinux worked very well. Thanks to the authors.

There was a &quot;distribution&quot; called &quot;pubuntu&quot; (aka Portable Ubuntu) that makes use of coLinux, along with an X server (probably Xming) and even PulseAudio running on the host Windows system. For a while I used it to play around with Android porting (that was around Gingerbread), compiling kernels and Android with no issues at all. Fun times.

Good old times; I made the CentOS, Fedora and OpenSuSE images<p>Used this a lot for cross platform development, like C#&#x2F;.NET and Mono. Used this with an xserver on windows (xming?) and ran monodevelop or gvim.

Why didn&#x27;t Microsoft go with something like this for WSL, instead of using a VM for WSL2?

I used to use andLinux for my CS work before I grew out of gaming for good. It was great.

Interesting how this compares with the newer Linux Services for Windows.