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Hailey

With Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux you can run all your favourite Windows and Linux apps side-by-side with a modern Linux kernel running cooperatively with the Windows kernel in ring 0. And unlike modern WSL, no hardware virtualisation is used so even your 486 can run it!

Please enjoy, I think this might be one of my greatest hacks of all time

codeberg.org/hails/wsl9x

really got this one in right under the wire before they start removing 486 support from linux

@hailey ... old linux distros never die ... just like windows ones apparently don't either ... :)

@hailey this is a gorgeous hack, congratulations.

@bytex64 yeah I used that for embedded linux development on corporate windows machines back in the day
@hailey

@bytex64 @hailey this used to be a fun pasttime, it's a shame the 64 bit port didn't make it across the line.

@hailey jesus fucking christ this is an abomination of epic proportions that has no right to exist in a just universe and I love it so much

@uep @hailey I am going to run this in Windows 95 on a Sun PC card under Solaris 7.

@mike @ben @uep @hailey
We love a good SunPCi card! Gotta get my SBUS SunPC card going one of these days. Also shame that my DOS-compatible Mac's PSU gave up...

@mike @hailey I was looking for a way to express my feelings but I was too disturbed to find the right words and then I found your post and I felt validated 8-D

@hailey @catsalad Looks like macOS 27. Less transparency, solid UI elements.💁🏻‍♂️

@hailey I hope MichaelMJD takes note of that...
CC @klarisadventure

@hailey Time to revisit Uncharted Waters II

Would I still get my BSOD if I write bad code? Won't be the same without that.

@hailey there's an even better hack: use linux natively

@hailey okay first of all what the hell

@hailey this is incredible?? :blobcat_dundundun:

@Firesphere @hailey Let's run Foobar2000 with Wine for Linux inside the Win9x kernel. What could possibly go wrong?

@hailey I used coLinux on my Win98 K6 system, is this similar?

@hailey looking at coLinux' time line, this must've been after I upgraded the system to WinXP.

@hailey Wow - that is freaking impressive!
Back in the day (yes - i'm that old) we had to used cygwin x'3
And that project seems to be still alive: cygwin.com/ cx

www.cygwin.comCygwin

@hailey Is this like CoLinux? It was running User Mode Linux as a Windows process on XP, no virtualisation needed. Basically WSL2 way ahead of it's time!

The only caveat is that it relied on both arches having compatible pointer sizes which excluded 64bit, so it was never ported to win7.

On a technical aspect though WSL1 is IMHO even better than it's successor, it's literally implementing POSIX and Linux on the NT microkernel. After all NT was supposed to also run OS/2 and Xenix...

@dermoth @hailey Yup. It made me feel like they were bypassing an underlying feature in the Windows architecture as if it was a bug.

@dermoth @hailey you can still use WSL1, it just requires a supported settings change. supposedly still maintained in parallel too. it's still the easiest way to get virtualbox to coexist, since it's grumpy if hyperv is around.

@hailey that sounds really slow on my pentium
but it's also cool. wonder how it compares to cygwin

@hailey This is exactly the kind of thing we need, the portal to the nether realms is almost open.

@hailey omg, this brings back memories of using coLinux back in the 2000s

this is beautiful

@hailey "Favorite windows apps" 😂.
(Sorry, I don't want to miss any cheap windows joke)

But seriously: is Windows 9x better than wine? Just tried wine so far.

@hailey oh my god hailey this is incredible

@hailey Does it run Command & Conquer? Otherwise it’s useless ;-)

@hailey coLinux but for Win9x is intriguing

@hailey

Um actually, v86 mode is a form of hardware virtualisation. This is misleading!

But for real (mode), this is very cool! How much torturing of the Windows 95 VMM did this need?

@w8l surprisingly not that much! Calling a few VMM services like VMMCreateThread and the memory context related ones they say are internal only and should not be called but that's about it as far as internals poking goes

@hailey
Oh, you're the same person behind doslinux! Presumably a lot of your work on that also carried over to wsl9x, yes?

@w8l I've wanted to do wsl9x ever since I did doslinux! It just took me 6 years of turning it over in my head to figure out how to do it :) there's no direct lineage between the two projects, they take very different approaches, but I definitely took the learnings from doslinux with me

@hailey this is really cool! i gotta try it out myself... if i can figure out how to build it (i'm not good at that part lol)

@hailey Awesome. 🤩 I've just found some old CDs from old gamer magazines. A perfect way to spin them up.

@hailey I hate and love this, awesome work!

@hailey can you elaborate more how it works? I see some 16bit code there and windows driver code. Does it mean I need regular windows that is extended by linux somehow or what is the concept here?

@hailey@hails.org now to just write a wayland compositor for windows 9x and have the most cursed linux desktop to ever exist

@hailey have you made any attempt to get networking working? Presumably that's all you'd need to get X up and running since you could run Hummingbird eXceed or one of the other preexisting win9x X servers

@fraggle no attempt yet but I think it would just be a matter of writing a network driver for it on each side!

@hailey not a fan of any Windows release, but this is an impressive feat nontheless ...

@hailey wsl like keep your enemy close..is to halt linux migration.