Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from May, 2018

WSL: Filesystem fast and furious?

Introduction By now, everyone that is working long enough with WSL (a.k.a WSLinux ?) complaint at least once about a specific pain point: Filesystem performance. Microsoft acknowledged it several times already, and while they're aware of the problem they also know this is complicated to address as WSL is not virtualized. I do strongly recommend to watch (again) the Channel9 video on the Filesystem implementation (here's the blog post too ). Please note that some limitations described in the video and/or the blog post are since then been addressed. But the "logic" remains. So while a real solution will be implemented in the future by Microsoft, here is a quick "hack" that could help on certain projects. Our workspace is $HOME as usual, I will target the most used directory: the Desktop folder ... hmm ... I mean the $HOME directory. I blogged about it, on different ways you can have $HOME mounted/linked to a directory in Windows space (latest one

WSL + Explorer: the secret Terminal

Warning   Please note that while you should read this blog post as a "joke", which hopefully will make you smile, all the commands are technically correct and should work for you too. With that being said, let the show begin.  Introduction   During the //BUILD 2018 conference, the session with  Sarah  and  Tara  showed how far WSL has come and, lucky for us, we can now see the  replay  or if you prefer reading, Tara has your back with a  great recap .  at the very end of their presentation, there is small but (very) impactful demo: the Windows Explorer context menu now has "Open Linux shell here": Look at the past, you will see the future Unfortunately I don't remember who showed this first (I do apologize), but there's a neet trick with Windows Explorer: if you type "cmd.exe" in the address bar, it will open a command prompt in the current directory. So, with a little thinking and knowing that the shell is different from the Terminal a

WSL + Interop + Azure: $HOME is everywhere

Introduction Microsoft //BUILD is just 3 days away and while I'm just (super) sad that I will not attend, I wanted to bring a "special" gift. After some discussion on Twitter with @Tara_msft , she asked me if I tried Azure Cloud Shell. She past a link to the (incredibly) excellent @docmsft site. And the Pandora box was definitively open... The crazy idea after looking at the Cloud Shell, and reading  about Spot Instant Cloud, this (crazy) idea came to life: What if, I could tweak the "$HOME" hack  and make it available "everywhere"!  Or, due to the limitation of the Azure free account (in terms of storage capacity) and the "Network drives" permissions/behavior, at least I could put the important dot files in the Cloud Drive while keeping the development files on the "Interop zone" (read: /mnt/c/...) as described in Brian's blog post. To be prepared, you must Before we can apply what follows, some preparatio