Using WSL2 for your main linux development

This page is going to be a collection of experiences for using WSL2 as my main linux development environment. I moved from using VirtualBox because of

Moving to WSL2

WSL2 is not without it’s own quirks but I have gone with Ubuntu 18.04 as my starting environment. The quirks I have come across so far are

GUI applications

At this time I use VcXsrv on windows and run the GUI app from within a WSL2 shell. This has worked very well for the GUI apps I use

I’ve not tried a full desktop environment yet from WSL2 but I would think it should work quite well once you install an appropriate desktop environment into wsl2

I need to start the XServer with access checking disabled (only cause I am too lazy to work out how to only allow the WSL2 instance). I also fix the Xserver to a specific display number just to be sure, then I have the following script as part of my .bashrc to ensure all gui apps go to my desktop

echo "exporting display"
export DISPLAY=$(awk '/nameserver / {print $2; exit}' /etc/resolv.conf 2>/dev/null):5.0
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

or

echo "exporting display"
winip=$(ip route | grep default | awk '{print $3}')
export DISPLAY=$winip:5.0
export LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT=1

I can even share the clipboard between windows and linux apps (although you need to know the rules of when the clipboard might get overwritten otherwise you might think it wasn’t working)

Docker

Docker installs and you configure it in the same way you do in any other linux environment, but because WSL2 doesn’t have systemd. All you need to do is start the docker daemon so another piece of script for my .bashrc

RUNNING=`ps aux | grep dockerd | grep -v grep`
if [ -z "$RUNNING" ]; then
    sudo dockerd > /dev/null 2>&1 &
    disown
fi

Clock Skew

There is a known issue with WSL2 in the fact that it suffers from clock skew. This is where the clock inside WSL2 doesn’t match the clock on your host windows machine. I’ve also seen this problem with VirtualBox VMs as well. This becomes a real problem if you are running fabric inside a WSL2 instance but trying to communicate with it from the host machine as fabric, for security reasons, needs to be within a threshold of time difference in order to allow the external client to interact.

I’m not sure how a clock skew occurs as I can’t recreate it, but I have

There are many ways to fix the clock skew which can be found on google, the basic premise is that you tell your wsl instance to synchronise. What I don’t know is whether you need to do it for all WSL2 instance or just one of your instances as each instance my share the underlying WSL2 lightweight VM and kernel. There are multiple options to sync the clock

One idea I really liked was to have an automated task that ran to fix the clock skew on resume of your laptop. Details can be found at here

AppImages (not specific to WSL2 but wanted to mention them)

I love these, just download and run. Shame VSCode have refused to create them :-( VSCodium however is creating them

~$ ./VSCodium-1.49.3-1601685407.glibc2.16-x86_64.AppImage &

Other advantages

Vagrant I used to like vagrant (not their config file and it’s dependency on having to be written in Ruby) and virtual box images for vagrant were plentiful but there are alternatives

Resource Usage: WSL2 processes make use of resource in a similar manner to windows processes, they have full access to all the CPUs/Memory and no diskspace limitations. They seem to share well with all other windows processes (well, I’ve not had a problem yet) making them very responsive. You can restrict a WSL2 instance’s resources if necessary

TODO: Need to put the info in here

Speed: Open a shell and WSL2 is fully ready for use. It’s a lot faster than resuming a VM from suspend or starting from new.

Snapshoting: You can use the WSL CLI to export an instance, which should be equivalent to creating a snapshot of your setup. Not tried it yet but must do it on my current environment.

A more Complete environment: With WSL2 and Hyper-v enabled. I can run multiple linux VMs and WSL2 instances, I can use docker for windows outside of a linux environment. There is a But. Hyper-v is still rubbish at Linux VM Guis (not tried windows guis)

Other: WSL2 uses a lightweight VM using hyper-v technology. hyper-v technology is a type 1 hypervisor and this would hopefully mean that it should be able to run linux apps at near native speed ie non of the clever trickery employed by type 2 hypervisors such as binary translation in VMWare. Also hope it means that there isn’t a concern about having to add support for newer linux kernels.

Disadvantages

There are some disadvantages and these are around running full distros with desktops in hyper-v. Basically it’s crap. Microsoft, working with Canonical, have created ubuntu images with pre-configured xrdp, but my experience with xrdp is that although it supports passthrough of audio, the gui is just not as responsive compared to X2Go or Tiger VNC. If you don’t want to use these images then the only alternative is to set up something yourself which isn’t too much of a hassle but rather than having a native display driver environment employed by VirtualBox and VMWare, you are stuck with a remote display technology. These display driver technologies are far more comprehensive such as 3d support etc but when I last tried still weren’t great with HiDPI and 4K monitors

Hints and Tips

Nested Virtualisation

Here is a useful tip for hyper-v virtual machines (not for WSL2 machines), if you want to have nested virtualisation you need to enable it specifically while the VM is stopped of course.

(Admin Powershell) Set-VMProcessor -VMName <VM Name> -ExposeVirtualizationExtensions $true