Yes, anyway users can use virtual machines of VMware Player Using virtual machines of VMware Player in Windows 10 has many advantages:įor example, some old softwares can only be used in the old system, but does not work properly or are not compatible in the Windows 10 new system, in these cases users can use old softwares on the virtual machines of old systems in Windows 10.Īnother example is that some old hardwares' drivers can not be compatible with Windows 10 new system, also can use virtual machines of old systems in Windows 10 to load the drivers for old hardwares. If you try it out, I'd be curious to see the performance difference for your system between WSL2 and a VM.Install VMware Player virtual machines in Windows 10 So for anyone who wants a build environment without the bulkiness of a VM, WSL2 is a very viable option. VBox already kinda supports running under Hyper-V, but it's much, much slower at the moment. Both VMWare and VBox devs are working on this. Can't install WSL2 on it to compare as I need VMWare for work purposes, and WSL2 requires Hyper-V, which is currently incompatible with other hypervisors. So at least with this AMD CPU, WSL2 is quite faster than VBox.įor reference, my desktop's i7 7700K running VMWare Player does it in about 20-21 minutes. Doing the same build on the laptop running VirtualBox took 30 minutes. Searching through the Windows portion of the path introduced a major performance penalty.Īfter configuring WSL to not include the Windows search path within the Linux search path, I was able to get an RT-AC68U firmware to build in 25 minutes under WSL2 on my new laptop (an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 6-cores). After a few exchanges on Twitter with other WSL2 users (and Microsoft's own Program Manager responsible for WSL), we finally tracked down the issue to the search path (building the firmware requires to execute the compiler many thousands of times).

First results were horrible, build times on the laptop took three times longer than on the desktop's VM. I initially tried this on my new laptop to see how the performance was. Since Windows 10 version 2004 (and WSL2) are now officially available outside of the Insider Preview program, I figured I should finally clean up my notes, and document how to setup WSL2 to compile Asuswrt-Merlin.

Vmware player wsl2