[olug] Bash in Windows 10

[Christopher Cashell]

No, they basically built an ELF and system call translation layer that
they're calling the "Windows Subsystem for Linux".  It reminds me someone
of the old POSIX Subsystem for NT and the Unix Services for Windows that
existed until it was half integrated into Windows 2008R2 and half dumped.

It honestly looks pretty awesome.  Here's the best bits from one of the
articles linked below:

Here's let's break it down slowly...


   1. Windows 10 users
      2. Can open the Windows Start menu
      3. And type "*bash*" [enter]
      4. Which opens a *cmd.exe* console
      5. Running Ubuntu's */bin/bash*
      6. With full access to all of Ubuntu user space
      7. Yes, that means *apt <http://manpg.es/apt>*, *ssh*
      <http://manpg.es/ssh>, *rsync <http://manpg.es/rsync>*, *find
      <http://manpg.es/find>*, *grep <http://manpg.es/grep>*, *awk
      <http://manpg.es/awk>*, *sed <http://manpg.es/sed>*, *sort
      <http://manpg.es/sort>*, *xargs <http://manpg.es/xargs>*, *md5sum
      <http://manpg.es/md5sum>*, *gpg <http://manpg.es/gpg>*, *curl
      <http://manpg.es/curl>*, *wget <http://manpg.es/wget>*,*apache
      <http://manpg.es/apache2>*, *mysql* <http://manpg.es/mysql>, *python
      <http://manpg.es/python>*, *perl <http://manpg.es/perl>*, *ruby
      <http://manpg.es/ruby>*, *php <http://manpg.es/php>*, *gcc
      <http://manpg.es/gcc>, tar <http://manpg.es/tar>, vim
      <http://manpg.es/vim>, emacs <http://manpg.es/emacs>, diff
      <http://manpg.es/diff>, patch <http://manpg.es/patch>*...
      8. And most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the
      Ubuntu archives!

*"Right, so just Ubuntu running in a virtual machine?"*  Nope!  This isn't
a virtual machine at all.  There's no Linux kernel booting in a VM under a
hypervisor.  It's just the Ubuntu user space.

*"Ah, okay, so this is Ubuntu in a container then?"*  Nope!  This isn't a
container either.  It's native Ubuntu binaries running directly in Windows.

*"Hum, well it's like cygwin perhaps?"*  Nope!  *Cygwin *includes open
source utilities are recompiled from source to run natively in Windows.
Here, we're talking about bit-for-bit, checksum-for-checksum Ubuntu ELF
binaries running directly in Windows.


*"So maybe something like a Linux emulator?"*  Now you're getting warmer!
A team of sharp developers at Microsoft has been hard at work adapting some
Microsoft research technology to basically perform real time translation of
Linux syscalls into Windows OS syscalls.  Linux geeks can think of it sort
of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows.
Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux".  (No, it's not open
source at this time.)

*Oh, and it's totally shit hot!*  The *sysbench
<http://manpg.es/sysbench>*utility
is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and io performance.


Here are a couple of articles for more info.  The latter one is from an
Ubuntu developer who's been working on the project.

http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/30/be-very-afraid-hell-has-frozen-over-bash-is-coming-to-windows-10/
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html

On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 7:05 PM, T. J. Brumfield <enderandrew at gmail.com>
wrote:

> The really odd thing is that they specifically said this is native and not
> cross-compiled tools (like Cygwin).
>
> Does this mean they basically rewrote bash and GNU tools from scratch as
> new Windows apps?
>
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 7:02 PM, Jared Bernard <jared.bernard at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I had to make sure it wasn't April fools yet. This looks legit.
> > In case someone hasn't seen the news yet.
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/30/11331014/microsoft-windows-linux-ubuntu-bash
> >
> > A great way to fix the Windows command line.
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>
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-- 
Christopher