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by gecko 2925 days ago

    Actually, it was as recently as this very week! Running with all the
    latest updates on a new Surface Book 2, I ran into a variation of
    this open issue: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/1982.
Well that stinks. I'd swear I hit this and it got resolved with the inotify-related patches, but clearly I misremembered. Might be thinking of uwsgi or something.

Re. Hyper-V: yeah, I do a Samba mount. This in my experience actually performs a ton better than VirtualBox shared folders, but it's been a long time. I have no idea how it compares to VMware's implementation. (VMware and VirtualBox also have the ability to cleanly virtualize a graphics-accelerated Linux desktop, which is not something I need or care about, but might be a show-stopper for both WSL and Hyper-V if you do.)

1 comments

That's okay -- I'm sure they fixed something like that issue! The WSL team has been crazy busy, and their work so far is super impressive.

VirtualBox shared folders had their own problems. `npm` wants to create symlinks for commands provided by packages, but VirtualBox doesn't support symlinks by default on Windows shares. So you have to execute an arcane command to enable that feature -- every time you restart the computer.

Interesting to hear that performance is decent with the Samba share. I presumed it would be otherwise. In that case, Hyper-V with Samba may be my last shot at getting the machine to work for me... we'll see if I can muster any more enthusiasm.

It is possible to create directory symlinks in Windows. It is called junctions [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_junction_point

NTFS actually has support for proper symbolic links, which are not the same as junction points. I come across this confusion fairly often and I'm not clear why. (`mklink /d` is what you're looking for, and do note that this is different from `mklink /j` in meaningful ways. Do note these commands must be run from an Administrator shell prior to Windows 10.)

[EDIT: Also, reading GP, it looks like their issue is something about VirtualBox support for symlinks, not Windows support for symlinks. Symlinks are enabled in Windows by default, so they'd only have to do something special if they were on a domain that disabled them in the group policy--but in that case, they wouldn't be able to turn them back on themselves on a reboot anyway.]