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by rizalp 389 days ago
It's because WSL2 is using HyperV behind the scenes, and HyperV is a Type 1 (Native Hypervisor), running directly on top of hardware.

When you activate it, it also makes you host windows OS virtualized as well, albeit with native access for some components like GPU etc.

That's why all other Windows Hypervisor (Virtualbox, VMWare Workstation) will experience one issue or another when WSL2 is activated, because more abstraction is happening and more things could go wrong.
1 comments
dataflow 389 days ago
That makes no sense. Are you actually familiar with the technical issues or are you hand-waving? WSL2 itself is a Linux VM running in top of Hyper-V. Heck, as far as I know other Hyper-V VMs run fine alongside WSL2 too. Why can't a VirtualBox Linux VM do the same?
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rizalp 389 days ago
Because Virtualbox and VMWare Workstation is Type-2 hypervisor, they run on top of the host OS (Windows), and not directly on hardware.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor

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dataflow 389 days ago
That doesn't in any way explain why VirtualBox couldn't be made to run on top of Hyper-V. You might as well tell me Linux apps can't be made to run on Windows because Windows isn't Linux.
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rizalp 389 days ago
> Anybody know what the deal is with neither Oracle nor Microsoft trying to make it possible for VirtualBox and WSL2 to coexist without severe performance impact? What the heck is the issue that neither side knows how to solve? Or is there a deliberate business decision not to solve it?

Oh I thought your parrent post was asking general overview on why Virtualbox will have severe performance impact if WSL2 is activated. I posted the reason due to multiple abstraction conflicting with each other and there you go.

> Why VirtualBox couldn't be made to run on top of Hyper-V. You might as well tell me Linux apps can't be made to run on Windows because Windows isn't Linux

AFAIK it's already possible but still experimental on Virtualbox, also it's hard issue to solve, and have tiny ROI I suppose. And why would they spent time fixing this slowness that only impact some small userbase like you?

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dataflow 389 days ago
> AFAIK it's already possible but still experimental on Virtualbox, also it's hard issue to solve, and have tiny ROI I suppose. And why would they spent time fixing this slowness that only impact some small userbase like you?

It seems like you're just making guesses and don't actually know the answer? The reason I asked wasn't that I couldn't make the same guesses; it was that I had read online that there are technical obstacles here that (for reasons I don't understand, hence the question) they've had a hard time overcoming. i.e. "tiny RoI" or "small userbase" don't fully explain what I've read.

I was hoping someone would actually know the answer, not just make guesses I could have made myself.

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