Microsoft Announces Public Preview For Linux Containers On WSL

Microsoft today shipped the first public preview of WSL Containers "WSLC" as their latest extension of the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 11.

WSL Containers brings a native Linux container experience to WSL for building, running, and managing of Linux containers via the wslc command line tool. The WSLC preview brings all the capabilities for container lifecycle management, various networking options, GPU support is working from day one, SDK integration for C++ and C#/WinRT, and other tooling and capabilities.

The WSL Containers public preview is part of today's WSL 2.9.3 release.

There is also a post around the WSL Containers support on the Microsoft Dev Blog for highlighting this capability with benefits ranging from cloud-native workloads to easier testing and deployment with WSL. The blog post notes Microsoft is making more WSL improvements, including switching to VirtIOFS as the new default file-system for WSL containers for up to 2x faster performance. There are also networking improvements and improved memory reclaim.