Pengwin – A Linux Distro Optimized for WSL Based on Debian

https://github.com/WhitewaterFoundry/Pengwin

by edgr • 7 years ago

104 88 7 years ago

github.com

kevin_b_er2• 7 years ago

I tried looking around but didn't see anything about it.

What makes this optimized for WSL?

maccio923• 7 years ago

Scroll down to Features on the linked page..

kevin_b_er2• 7 years ago

Pengwin is also the first Linux distribution pre-configured and optimized to run specifically on Windows® Subsystem for Linux, a Microsoft-supported feature of Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019.

Yes. What kinds of optimizations make it optimized? This is my original question. Telling me the equivalent of "read the article" changes nothing when I've already done so and that it doesn't say what's been changed to make it optimized.

I've yet to carefully go through all 900 commits of with subject lines almost entirely of pull request #s, but one would think if whole repo's title was how it was "optimized" they could substantiate what they mean or what they did.

pengwinhayden5• 7 years ago

We alter dozens of settings to defaults that make sense for the WSL environment. Unlike the other distributions available for WSL, Pengwin is designed for WSL first.

h1d3• 7 years ago

Any examples of the optimizations?

ncmncm6• 7 years ago

This is fundamentally the wrong direction to go.

The clue is that MSWin running in a VM on Linux is faster than on hardware. The way forward is to boot Linux, or even something else, to manage hardware, memory, and filesystems, and cut down MSWin to run in a container on it. That way MSWin relies on the underlying OS to do things MSWin has proven to be just not very good at. MSWin runs programs written for it, reliably the same as non-hosted MSW, but is not subject to randomizing effects of manufacturers' drivers and MS's historically poor buffer and process management.

If you want MSWin to manage the screen, it can provide a way for an underlying OS program to work in a window it provides, and connect UI and clipboard events back to it. But MSWin is not really so great at display management, either, so it might be better for the underlying OS to manage that, too, as is done with VMs on X today.

maccio923• 7 years ago

I always have difficulties with drivers on linux. Never on Windows. Until they fix that I cannot use anything other than windows as my base system. I don't care if linux handles things slightly better

fartcannon• 7 years ago

There's nothing to fix. The devices are either open and a dev has decided to write his own, or the devices are closed and the drivers are provided by their respective creators.

If it's the former, pay a dev, if it's the latter, use a different device.

morning_gelato3• 7 years ago

Difficulties with drivers in terms of quality, availability or both? Regarding availability (and often quality) the only real/sustainable solution is for hardware manufacturers (who I think you are referring to by "they") to improve their Linux support.

andyonthewings• 7 years ago

MSWin running in a VM on Linux is faster than on hardware.

That's funny. I didn't know that. Any data source you can share with me?

itomato• 7 years ago

Apps certainly have been for a long time.

IE6 was famously (in my parts) known for being perceivably faster under Wine.

pushpop• 7 years ago

It seems a highly counterintuitive thing to say but I have anacdotelly noticed the same when running XP bare metal vs inside a VM running in Linux on the same hardware. Around that era I have hard others notice the same on their PCs as well - and that’s where the origins of this meme comes from. I didn’t spend any time investigating why Windows might perform differently since running the BM was just to save dual booting rather than any performance related reasons however I think it was primarily around file system operations where the difference was noticeable (this was before SSDs were ubiquitous).

Microsoft have invested considerable effort on improving the NT subsystem in subsequent releases of Windows so I would be surprised if that meme was still true. Plus SSDs likely even the playing field too.

glitchc2• 7 years ago

I don’t believe your assertion. A quick check on the latest system-taxing application (aka a game), confirms the exact opposite. Even a cross-platform game, compiled natively for both OSes, runs faster on Windows in most cases. How do you square these observations with your assertion.

mises2• 7 years ago

Which game? I don't agree with the position of the person to whom you are responding, but there's almost certainly much more optimization put into the Windows version.

morning_gelato3• 7 years ago

Games really aren't a good benchmark for overall system performance as they are generally optimized for Windows and non-Windows ports often receive a lot less attention. Also, most games are primarily stressing one thing - the graphics stack - and not I/O, scheduling, memory management etc.

gshulegaard2• 7 years ago

I assume you are limiting your definition of "system-taxing" to playing games specifically?

As other people have noted, filesystem performance is often better under Linux.

I also will point out that at least some rendering tasks can be faster under Linux as well:

http://blog.thepixelary.com/post/167616662857/improving-perf...

Just like with the filesystem performance discrepancy, this article seems to point out WDDM (Windows drivers) as the reason for this rendering discrepancy.

And while we are on gaming (since I am a gamer as well!) when comparing games that run natively on Linux as well as Windows, Linux often has a performance edge over Windows:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Win10-Li...

Of course most games do not support Linux natively so in order to game on Linux you have to use WINE, Proton, or full virtualization to get a non-native game to run and this extra middleware layer adds overhead. But this doesn't mean gaming performance on Linux is worse than Windows; as comparing native-to-native performance shows.

GordonS2• 7 years ago

That way MSWin relies on the underlying OS to do things MSWin has proven to be just not very good at

Could you expand on what some of these things are?

ncmncm6• 7 years ago

File operations. Corralling vendors to code reliable, non-crashy drivers. Input device event handling. Thread scheduling. I/O scheduling. Anything where tuning would have involved work by more than one product group.

e12e• 7 years ago

Even if your claim that running windows in a VM on hardware that have no Linux support, only windows support, is somehow feasible and faster... That kinda misses the point? Freebsd and windows have Linux binary support. I don't see why having a project catering to one of those would be "the wrong approach"? There's been some pretty successful efforts in helping games run under wine, as a "reverse" example.

losvedir• 7 years ago

The clue is that MSWin running in a VM on Linux is faster than on hardware.

I'll join the fray in expressing skepticism here. Source?

Anyway, I think this WSL distro is pretty cool. I've set up WSL on my Windows computer for kicks and while it was neat I never quite got it to work for the rust development and environment I wanted. I ended up just doing it in Windows.

But if this sets up rust and VS Code (the editor I wanted to use) painlessly, then I'll have to give it another shot.

zimbatm• 7 years ago

The filesystem is notably slower on Windows. It's easy to test it out for yourself; clone any big repo (eg: linux) in WSL and run `git status`. The Microsoft engineers have already done a lot of heroic efforts with WSL. The issue seems to be more inherent to the design and really hard to solve.

ref: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873

To be clear, this is for a specific use-case. I don't believe that all applications will have similar performance profiles and that Linux wins over Windows in all of the cases like OP seems to suggest.

ACE_Recliner• 7 years ago

The conceptual foundation to do something like this already exists in the form of Drawbridge and Hyper-V, there just needs to be a political will within Microsoft to make it happen.

rabi_penguin• 7 years ago

I think you'd want to qualify just which parts of which particular Windows applications running in a VM on Linux are faster. I see you refer to the filesystem driver, and that makes sense to me. However, if it's anything related to pro audio or 3D applications native to Windows, it would not square with my experience. Stability is also an important word to bring up here -- I haven't had a bad experience with WINE on Linux if it works. If it doesn't, I get odd behavior and crashing.

JohnFen• 7 years ago

I don't know if it's the wrong direction or not. I suppose it depends on what your goals are.

All I can say is that I don't see the need for any of it.

sys_64738• 7 years ago

I can run three displays natively on my Win 10 machine pretty effectively on a small Dell laptop. Linux is pretty poor at multi-screen support from my experience although it might have improved.

As I have a corporate laptop running Win10 I can't install anything except use Cygwin or WSL. It doesn't allow me to run a Linux VM as it has networking issues upon installing Hyper-V or Virtualbox.

So I'm stuck with WSL on Win 10 and appreciate the efforts of others to get X apps running on it.

crispinb• 7 years ago

It works well enough for me. I have no great love for Windows, but then the only available alternatives have proven worse for me (both osx & linux each used f/t for several years).

There are no good desktop os's in 2019, so they're all 'wrong'. Being 'wrong' therefore cannot be a good argument against their use. All we can do is find the best compromise for our purposes.

i_can_c_sharp• 7 years ago

I guess the “extend” phase is about to begin.

whalesalad• 7 years ago

the name is very clever.

crusso• 7 years ago

My thought too. No matter what the implementation or ideas behind it... that's a killer name.

penagwin2• 7 years ago

Hahaha such a great name yeah!

acqq2• 7 years ago

Interesting:

“Grants/Bounties

If you have an idea for a new feature you would like to see implemented in Pengwin and can implement it yourself given the funding, we are now accepting grant/bounty proposals. Grants are currently available for $50-$500 USD based on complexity.”

The upper limit is quite demotivating, from my point of view.

ghostly_s• 7 years ago

Demotivating to whom? I imagine the intent is to avoid creating an impression that anyone has the power to make their pet issue priority #1 for the dev team just by throwing enough money at it.

acqq2• 7 years ago

But it's not for a "dev team" at all, the way I understood it, it's:

"Learn how you can earn paid grants improving Pengwin."

"Your proposal will be promptly evaluated" ... "Your work sample and GitHub history will be evaluated to determine if you have the technical competancy to implement the proposed change and deliver timely." "If approved, you will recieve a simple agreement covering the scope of the work you will be doing which you must acknowledge and return and then you may commence work."

IronWolve• 7 years ago

Is WSL multithreaded? I love the ease of use that WSL gives, but it seems slow to cygwin on disk access. I think this is planned in a future fox by making the WSL directory to the disk instead of in a container file. I went back to cygwin for faster speed of scripts processing files.

cube2222• 7 years ago

It's only slow at file IO, yeah.

bashinator3• 7 years ago

File IO can be vastly improved by excluding the WSL OS directory from Windows Defender real-time protection. Here's a gist that has powershell and GUI instructions for accomplishing this: https://gist.github.com/noelbundick/9c804a710eb76e1d6a234b14...

davb2• 7 years ago

I noticed file IO was slow too. My solution is to do most of my work in headless Linux VMs, using WSL as the interface to manage and connect to those VMs. This way I get the bash shell and ssh client I love but get isolated environments for my projects/clients. I run samba on the Linux VMs, with mapped drives on the Windows host so that I can edit files using VS Code. Outwardly it might look a little convoluted but I get isolation, performance, convinience and an ultra smooth host OS experience.

I say this coming from around a decade of running Linux or MacOS on the desktop. This just works.

h1d3• 7 years ago

What do you use as your VM software? I take it VMWare has a pretty decent IO performance to host's files through HGFS when VirtualBox isn't as performing.

penagwin2• 7 years ago

Oh boy, similar name to me haha! ;)

writepub• 7 years ago

Can someone please enumerate how this is different from Ubuntu 18.04 (from Canonical) on WSL? Other than distro differences, I see a LOT of marketing speak in the Github ReadMe, but I can't tell if they really offer any advantage over competing offerings.

pengwinhayden5• 7 years ago

On a technical level Ubuntu 18.04 is based on a mix of Debian stable and testing with Canonical's additions.

Pengwin is primarily Debian testing, with some stable and some unstable here and there.

Pengwin configures dozens of settings for WSL and has optional WSL-specific features.

Settings are delivered by pengwin-base and features can be configured with pengwin-setup.

You could probably spend hours implementing these features on your own each time you have to install Ubuntu on a new Windows device.

But by purching Pengwin you support open source indie devs that handle it for you, answer bug reports, constantly add new featres, and are available for support.

mkl• 7 years ago

What are these settings you keep referring to?

The readme is very vague about what Pengwin's features and differences actually are, and gives me no solid reasons to switch from Ubuntu, which already seems well-suited to WSL. Am I correct that trying Pengwin requires paying and installing through the Microsoft Store, even though it's open source?

spmcbride1201• 7 years ago

I'm a paying customer that's been running my main dev system on WSL and Pengwin for four months now. I've got it on my ThinkPad and my beefy desktop and sync the two environments using .dotfiles. There is a bit of an I/O slowdown compared to native (most noticable when npm installing a billion tiny modules), but generally everything is quite functional. No driver issues as when I've run Linux. No terrible Mac keyboard. I run VSCode under WSL to keep my dev toolchain on the Linux side. The main thing that forces me to dual boot to Ubuntu is CUDA development, but I find that most of this sort of work has shifted to Jupyter Notebook.

vesinisa• 7 years ago

What's the main benefit of this distro over the standard Ubuntu usually offered for WSL?

xmichael999• 7 years ago

I'm so confused right now. I looked at the various links and cant believe I still can't figure this out. The kernel is windows or linux? How do I get or run this? I install windows and then this? Someone help me out here!

jamesgeck03• 7 years ago

WSL is a Windows 10 feature that allows you to run Linux applications on the NT kernel. It's not a 100% complete implementation of every Linux kernel API (yet?) but it's far enough along that you can run a lot of interesting software.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheYearOfLinuxOnTheWindowsDes...

Pengwin looks like a Linux distro that removes the parts of a traditional distro that don't make sense in WSL and streamlines things that are still somewhat difficult in WSL, like getting X applications running.

h1d3• 7 years ago

I get it that WSL is easy for anyone to use but why not just run a real Linux in VMware or VirtualBox and you'll have 100% compatible Linux environment.

Prebuilt OS image is just a single download and deploy.

cpuguy83• 7 years ago

WSL is Windows Subsystem for Linux, and it is part of Windows. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 It translates Linux system calls into Windows.

This allows you to run a Linux userspace on Windows. The Windows store has (for free) installable distros for Ubuntu, Debian, and others.

squarefoot• 7 years ago

Essentially WSL is to Linux what WINE has been for years to Windows: it translates Linux system calls natively to Windows ones so that Linux binaries can be executed on Windows without any recompiling or virtualization. Technically is a great milestone, but there are some risks: suppose one day Microsoft implements a way to use Windows GUI elements or other resources directly from Linux binaries and people starts writing "Linux" software that uses the new capabilities, de facto requiring WSL (ie Windows) to be run, how many Linux users would jump ship? My only fear is that Microsoft could be planning to do just that.

jamesgeck03• 7 years ago

That seems improbable, although the reverse is happening. When Flatpak support is complete, it'll be possible to have desktop application packages that just work on both Windows and Linux.

yellowapple2• 7 years ago

Is this actually a Linux distro, though? I've long held that "WSL" is a misnomer; it happens to be compatible with binaries compiled for Linux, but given that no Linux code is actually present, this would really be Debian GNU/NT.

xfer• 7 years ago

What? WSL emulates linux syscalls and vfs, how is this a misnomer?

yellowapple2• 7 years ago

It's a misnomer because it's not actually Linux (nor does it even wrap/include Linux in any way), just like how Wine isn't actually Windows (if it was Linux, then Microsoft is blatantly violating the GPL). Most charitably, it's less "Windows Subsystem for Linux" and more "Windows Subsystem for Programs Compiled for Linux".

wsargent• 7 years ago

Started using this yesterday, with the X410 X11 install.

The nicest thing has to be running IntelliJ from X11 and have it see the linux filesystem.

I can run a Yubikey with weasel-pageant and get GPG signing and SSH keychain access to github through it -- it pops up a Windows PIN entry dialog box and then works fine thereafter. You can use wslutilities (wslusc) to set up windows shortcuts to your Linux applications. I use ConEmu as my shell and it's fine.

There is a problem with HiDPI screens. I've worked around this by increasing the font size in IntelliJ, but VS Code shows up as teensy tiny.

The worst part has to be the documentation. The docs for "pengwin-setup" is basically a bunch of screenshots on their blog.

Pengwin – A Linux Distro Optimized for WSL Based on Debian

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