Decompiling .exe file

croo wrote: »

Since every windows install will also be a Linux install they will/may become the biggest Linux distributor. Of course these will not be distributions of a typical GNU/Linux so it will make a nonsense of the numbers - that might be part of the business strategy nehind the decision!?

It's more like a hypervisor running many, arbitrary, VM containers.

The default distro will be Ubuntu, and Microsoft pay Canonical specifically for Linux-on-Windows support. But you can install any other distro you like such as CentOS or RHEL, it's just a plain Linux kernel, indeed you can go build it yourself using https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.

Windows and Linux talk to one another via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9P_(protocol), so Windows can see all the files in your Linux, and vice versa. Different Linux distros can also see one another, so your Ubuntu-on-Windows can also see your RHEL-on-Windows.

Something perhaps not widely appreciately is just how deep this integration is. This brings goodies such as ZFS to Windows, because you can load in the ZFS modules into your Linux kernel, and then now you have ZFS on Windows. Same goes for everything else on Linux e.g. you can now do Linux device driver development on Windows, and indeed from Microsoft Visual Studio which can already directly use cmake, make, GCC and GDB. They intend that Visual Studio will become the only IDE that you ever need to use.

Where they are heading is that the single best place to do anything on Linux will be on Windows. They have publicly stated that they intend for people to put Linux servers into production which are running Windows, so anywhere where you might have a Linux hypervisor serving out many Linux VMs, you might instead have a Windows hypervisor serving out many Linux or Windows VMs. All running at full, native, speed.

One can have whatever feelings you like about Microsoft, but everybody would have to admit that the engineering, and chutzpah, is impressive.

Niall