Windows 10 native-hosting Ubuntu user space

[Tom Roche]

anybody tried this?

http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2016/03/ubuntu-on-windows.html?m=1
> Wednesday, March 30, 2016
> [by Dustin Kirkland, Canonical Ubuntu Product and Strategy]
> Ubuntu on Windows -- The Ubuntu Userspace for Windows Developers

...

> as unveiled today in a demo during Kevin Gallo's opening keynote of the Build conference.... An Ubuntu user space and bash shell, running natively in a Windows 10 cmd.exe console!

...

> 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, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, 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.

> [long pause]

> "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 utility is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and [I/O] performance.