Clear Linux Exploring Support For Windows WSL

As potentially a big game changer for those needing performant Linux access from a Windows 10 / Windows Server installation, Intel's Clear Linux will be exploring support for running on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

A Phoronix reader pointed out to us this GitHub thread where one of the developers will begin exploring WSL support this week.

WSL is what allows running native Linux binaries from a Windows installation via this latest Microsoft tech. So far distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, and openSUSE/SUSE have been supported and available through the Microsoft Store. Recently Microsoft made it easier for more Linux distributions to be offered on WSL.

Clear Linux tends to be the fastest out-of-the-box/default Linux distribution in our testing, so it will certainly be interesting to see how fast it runs with WSL. In some tests of Ubuntu on WSL in CPU-bound scenarios we see the WSL based environment sometimes outperforming a bare metal Linux install itself (due to optimized kernel/scheduler performance on Windows at least for some configurations) so seeing how much faster WSL could be on Windows 10 will be fascinating to look at once this support is available.

But the main limitation of WSL at this point remains with very slow I/O performance, but nevertheless will be fun to benchmark Clear Linux on Windows 10 if/when this support is in place.