In the latest Windows Insider build, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) now allows you to manually mount Windows drives using the DrvFs file system. Previously, WSL would automatically mount all fixed NTFS drives when you launch Bash, but there was no support for mounting additional storage like removable drives or network locations.
Now, not only can you manually mount any drives on your system, we’ve also added support for other file systems such as FAT, as well as mounting network locations. This enables you to access any drive, including removable USB sticks or CDs, and any network location you can reach in Windows all from within WSL.
There’s a lot of work being done on WSL.
Passing mount points to linux is a nice addition for WSL, I suppose, but to be honest most real unix/linux users take these kinds of capabilities for granted and it’s just the WSL subsystem catching up with a glorified bind mount.
At first glace, I was actually hoping this would be the other way around and that windows was finally adding support for linux native file systems like fuse, extfs, btrfs. These would be very helpful for users who are running real linux workstations alongside windows ones.
Edited 2017-04-19 21:12 UTC
They added WSL to Windows and WSL has support for those file systems. So people that are running linux workstations can access those from inside WSL with the tooling that they are used to from Linux.
I agree that Windows would be better with out-of-the box-support for more filesystems but adding WSL has solved all my requirements.
Is it just me or is the naming just wrong?
If something is called “Windows Subsystem for Linux” I would expect something like Wine: a subsystem that runs on a Linux-Kernel.
But this thing runs on Windows … so it is a subsystem for Windows, or more precise:
a Linux Subsystem for Windows.
In Microsoft terminology, Windows always comes first!
They’re just using a different Endianness to you.
It isn’t a Subsystem for Windows, it’s a Windows Subsystem. Winnt was designed to alow multiple subsystems or personalities, the most used is the Subsystem for Windows (csrss.exe).
So you are saying, the Subsystem for Windows is a Windows Subsystem, as is the Subsystem for Linux…
I haven’t tried it recently, but, can I make changes to the WSL tree from outside of the bash shell and have it reflected? Previusly, if I decided to copy files into the WSL tree via Explorer (Or, usually, Total Commander), they would remain invisible….