Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu on Windows)

Well, this is something!

• This is the news that got the biggest applause at Microsoft's big event today

  Microsoft partnered up with Canonical, developers of the mega-popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. Thanks to some technical wizardry work by the two companies, Windows 10 now has a way to run Ubuntu software.

• Developers can run Bash Shell and user-mode Ubuntu Linux binaries on Windows 10

  This isn't Bash or Ubuntu running in a VM. This is a real native Bash Linux binary running on Windows itself. It's fast and lightweight and it's the real binaries. This is an genuine Ubuntu image on top of Windows with all the Linux tools I use like awk, sed, grep, vi, etc. It's fast and it's lightweight. The binaries are downloaded by you - using apt-get - just as on Linux, because it is Linux. You can apt-get and download other tools like Ruby, Redis, emacs, and on and on. This is brilliant for developers that use a diverse set of tools like me.

  This runs on 64-bit Windows and doesn't use virtual machines.

• Ubuntu on Windows — The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers

  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).

• Ubuntu (not Linux) on Windows: How it works

  A Microsoft spokesperson explained, "We built new infrastructure within Windows, WSL, upon which we run a genuine Ubuntu user-mode image provided by our great partners over at Canonical, creators of Ubuntu Linux. The result is that you can now run native Bash on Ubuntu on Windows."

• Ubuntu’s bash and Linux command line coming to Windows 10

  We're still trying to get the inside story on what Microsoft has done here, but what we've known for several months now is that the company has developed some Windows kernel components (lxcore.sys, lxss.sys, presumably standing for "Linux core" and "Linux subsystem," respectively) that support the major Linux kernel APIs. These components are not GPLed and do not appear to contain Linux code themselves; instead, they implement the Linux kernel API using the native Windows NT API that the Windows kernel provides. Microsoft is calling this the "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL)

  ...

  Our understanding is that these are not recompiled or ported versions of the programs (as are used in tools aiming to provide a Unix-like environment on Windows such as Cygwin) but instead unmodified programs. Microsoft is describing this in terms of providing a Linux-like command-line environment at the moment, but from what we can gather, there's little fundamental restriction to this, potentially opening the door to running a wide range of Linux programs natively on Windows.

• Android and iOS apps on Windows: What is Microsoft doing—and will it work?

  Windows has long included the ability to support multiple API families through a feature called subsystems. The Win32 API that almost all Windows software (including Universal Windows apps) use is obviously the biggest and best known of these APIs, and in modern versions of Windows is in fact the only API. But historically, there have been others. The very first versions of Windows NT included, of all things, an OS/2 subsystem that supported certain kinds of OS/2 applications. It was a relic of history, a product of Microsoft and IBM's once cooperative operating system development.

• Latest Windows 10 Redstone Build 14521 May Have A Linux Subsystem

  WalkingCat has initially revealed the mystical Linux subsystem files in a Twitter post.

  what the hell ? Windows 10 14251 has lxcore.sys and lxss.sys ? aren't they part of Project Astoria ? and for Mobile only ?

This will be interesting news to follow!