The way WSL1 worked is actually quite interesting: The NT kernel always had the capability to run multiple subsystems, with Win32 only being one of them and there were subsystems available for OS/2, POSIX and later UNIX. WSL1 was pretty much a revival of that feature. So WSL1 is indeed somewhat like Wine, but making heavy use of some features built into the kernel. So yeah, no real boot process happening.
(Also it’s kinda stupid that the ‘S’ in WSL2 still stands for ‘subsystem’, despite not using that feature anymore.)
I liked the WSL1 approach better. I find it ironic that the Windows kernel lacks so many useful features that it simply wasn’t possible to properly implement things like cgroups on top of it, so they just gave up and ran Linux in a VM for WSL2
The way WSL1 worked is actually quite interesting: The NT kernel always had the capability to run multiple subsystems, with Win32 only being one of them and there were subsystems available for OS/2, POSIX and later UNIX. WSL1 was pretty much a revival of that feature. So WSL1 is indeed somewhat like Wine, but making heavy use of some features built into the kernel. So yeah, no real boot process happening.
(Also it’s kinda stupid that the ‘S’ in WSL2 still stands for ‘subsystem’, despite not using that feature anymore.)
I liked the WSL1 approach better. I find it ironic that the Windows kernel lacks so many useful features that it simply wasn’t possible to properly implement things like cgroups on top of it, so they just gave up and ran Linux in a VM for WSL2