[metta2uall]

I have a lot of admiration for the WSL1-style approaches & hope they bear fruit. The major problem with WSL2 & Android VMs is that they're a pain in an already virtualised environment - there's then a need for nested virtualisation.

[dist-epoch]

On a recent computer with a recent Windows installation what you think is bare-metal Windows is actually a (high-privilege) VM running under Hyper-V.

[AshamedCaptain]

This is absolutely irrelevant to the above comment because there is no nested virtualization involved: the "high-privilege" VM will spawn other VMs as siblings of itself (in the root Hyper-V instance), not as nested VMs.

[p_ing]

The parent partition is not considered a VM, nor does the implementation of VBS make the "parent partition" (with just VBS, it isn't) a VM.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-...

The parent partition has full access to hardware and child partitions (VMs). The hardware is not virtualized to the parent.

[ZenoArrow]

What source can you point to that backs up this claim? Also, is this for Windows Server only or for desktop versions also?

[ChocolateGod]

Yes if you enable Hyper-V the main Windows installation is running under a hypervisor, but it's running with nearly complete access to the physical hardware.

[jeroenhd]

Is nested virtualisation still a problem on Windows? Intel and AMD have supported it for so long I don't think I still own hardware that lacks it.

It's a pain when renting a VPS sometimes, but on Windows I don't think that's a common problem.

[electroly]

It's not a problem for Windows, it's a problem for AWS: only metal instances support nested virtualization. To this very day you can't use WSL2 on most EC2 instances.

It's also a problem for Microsoft's new ARM64-based Surface devices: Snapdragon X doesn't support nested virtualization, even though Windows does.

[p_ing]

Hyper-V has supported nested virtualization since Server 2016/Win 10. It is also supported to run WSLv2 in a nested VM.