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Discussion on: WSL 2.0: More of the good juice

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

What I find interesting about all this is that in theory, it should give a pretty easy path for Windows to be able to (mostly directly) access pretty much any Linux filesystem with minimal compatibility issues. That in and of itself is huge because Linux has at best shoddy support for NTFS and exFAT, which makes sharing files between Windows and Linux on the same system a bit of a pain.

It will be interesting as well to see how Windows Defender's on-access file scanning interacts with all of this. That by itself was actually a bigger performance hit for me than the VFS compatibility layer was (I've actually tested the VFS performance in WSL with and without Windows Defender enabled, it's a rather startling difference).

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hamza profile image
Hamza Tamenaoul

Indeed ! I am not sure if Microsoft would want to share the network protocol, the 9P protocol, it uses to access the filesystem, because it will be a game changer (Imagine being able to access files on a ext4 partition directly in Windows with no problems).

However I haven't thought about how Windows Defender would interact with it. It will be interesting to see how it would unfold. The idea of having a cross operating system antivirus looks promising. Do you have any resources on the subject ?

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ahferroin7 profile image
Austin S. Hemmelgarn

If they're using 9P (which I had not previously realized) it's more a question of whether the transport is user accessible, not whether the protocol is 'shared'. 9P itself is open, and it's remarkably easy to write clients for.

As far as Defender, it would not be unique in any manner as a cross-OS AV system (ClamAV for example already handles both Windows and Linux just fine, it just doesn't have in-built realtime scanning). What I'm more interested in is seeing if they decide to try and shoehorn Defender's on-access scanning into the VFS layer for WSL itself, which would probably translate to a pretty big performance hit.