Windows 10 Creators Update

[chants]

Just curious from the RE side.

Does anyone have any experience working with Windows Subsystem for Linux?

Anyone actually have a HoloLens or good augmented reality toys to play with?

Anyone squeezed any extra noticeable frames per second (FPS) out of this new update?

Microsoft's total focus change towards Linux/Android and now gaming and virtual reality is really quite an interesting shift. Any other thoughts or comments?

[TechLord]

Originally Posted by chants

Just curious from the RE side.

Does anyone have any experience working with Windows Subsystem for Linux?

...

Microsoft's total focus change towards Linux/Android and now gaming and virtual reality is really quite an interesting shift. Any other thoughts or comments?

Its really at a very early stage of development and most of the time the WSL crashes very frequently

That was why I decided to put on hold for the time being.

However I do have hope that it would be made stable very soon.

Cheers

[evlncrn8]

wsl worked fine for me, its decent for standard dev stuff like compiling etc, but some things microsoft did restrict, so for a build system etc, now you dont need a vm or whatnot to cross compile, or to do (basic) tests

[TechLord]

Yes, as I said, its good for the very basic stuff only.

For anything even slightly more advanced, I'd just boot up from a LIVE Linux OS USB/DVD and use - without even the need for a VM.

[chants]

The Ubuntu version installed originally after the Anniversary Update was Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty Tahr". It was updated to Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial Xerus" in the Creators Update.

Might be worth giving it another spin since they continue work on it though they note:

Microsoft envisages WSL as "primarily a tool for developers – especially web developers and those who work on or with open source projects."

[Mkz]

For me, the 2 main limitations it currently has are:

- Not possible to pipe between Lxss and non-Lxss processes, or even between them unless triggered from within the Bash console itself:

C:\>bash -c 'ls -l /mnt/c' | bash -c 'less'
Error: 0x80070057

C:\>dir C:\ | bash -c 'less'
Error: 0x80070057

- Tools such as ProcessExplorer are basically unable to inspect anything about the spawned processes under Bash (pico processes, I think).
The whole "Bash" installation is under %LOCALAPPDATA%\Lxss\ but PE shows the running pid and process names and not much more. I believe Process Hacker has slightly more info but still extremely limited, as the kernel itself doesn't provide the info.

For these reasons, when using Windows I mostly rely on Cygwin for the linux mixed-world stuff, as interoperability is far greater at least for the time being. And of course a full blown Ubuntu or CentOS for native environment when needed.