Introduction

The WSL2-Linux-Kernel repo contains the kernel source code and
configuration files for the WSL2 kernel.

Reporting Bugs

If you discover an issue relating to WSL or the WSL2 kernel, please report it on
the WSL GitHub project. It is not possible to report issues on the
WSL2-Linux-Kernel project.

If you're able to determine that the bug is present in the upstream Linux
kernel, you may want to work directly with the upstream developers. Please note
that there are separate processes for reporting a normal bug and
a security bug.

Feature Requests

Is there a missing feature that you'd like to see? Please request it on the
WSL GitHub project.

If you're able and interested in contributing kernel code for your feature
request, we encourage you to submit the change upstream.

Build Instructions

Instructions for building an x86_64 WSL2 kernel with an Ubuntu distribution using bash are
as follows:

1. Install the build dependencies:
   $ sudo apt install build-essential flex bison dwarves libssl-dev libelf-dev cpio qemu-utils

2. Modify WSL2 kernel configs (optional):
   $ make menuconfig KCONFIG_CONFIG=Microsoft/config-wsl

3. Build the kernel using the WSL2 kernel configuration and put the modules in a modules
   folder under the current working directory:
   $ make KCONFIG_CONFIG=Microsoft/config-wsl && make INSTALL_MOD_PATH="$PWD/modules" modules_install

   You may wish to include -j$(nproc) on the first make command to build in parallel.

Then, you can use a provided script to create a VHDX containing the modules:
$ sudo ./Microsoft/scripts/gen_modules_vhdx.sh "$PWD/modules" $(make -s kernelrelease) modules.vhdx

To save space, you can now delete the compilation artifacts:
$ make clean && rm -r "$PWD/modules"

If you prefer, you can also build the modules VHDX manually as follows:

1. Calculate the modules size (plus 256MiB for slack):
   modules_size=$(du -bs "$PWD/modules" | awk '{print $1;}'); modules_size=$((modules_size + (256 * (1<<20))));

2. Create a blank image file for the modules:
   dd if=/dev/zero of="$PWD/modules.img" bs=1024 count=$((modules_size / 1024))

3. Setup filesystem and mount img file:
   lo_dev=$(sudo losetup --find --show "$PWD/modules.img") && sudo mkfs -t ext4 "$lo_dev" && mkdir "$PWD/modules_img" && sudo mount "$lo_dev" "$PWD/modules_img"

4. Copy over the modules, unmount the img now that we're done with it:
   sudo cp -r "$PWD/modules/lib/modules/$(make -s kernelrelease)"/* "$PWD/modules_img" && sudo umount "$PWD/modules_img"

5. Convert the img to VHDX:
   qemu-img convert -O vhdx "$PWD/modules.img" "$PWD/modules.vhdx"

6. Clean up:
   rm modules.img # optionally $PWD/modules dir and the now-empty $PWD_modules_img dir too

Install Instructions

Please see the documentation on the .wslconfig configuration
file for information on using a custom built kernel.