What’s new in the latest WSL update?
Feature-wise, there aren’t big changes with a Linux kernel update, but having a newer kernel means Microsoft has been able to remove some out-of-tree patches it was building on top of the older kernel. That’s because those changes have now been upstreamed into the Linux kernel itself. If you want the full list of changes in this WSL update, here’s what it includes:
- First WSL2 kernel release updated to v6.6 from v5.15
- Release rolling-lts/wsl/6.6.36.3
- Update to stable kernel version v6.6.36
- New x86 and ARM64 configs including loadable modules
- dxgkrnl: Do not print error messages when virtual GPU is not present
- Fewer out of tree patches. Sets of patches now included from upstream:
- page reporting commits (feature/page-reporting/5.15)
- vpci commits (feature/vpci/5.15)
- memory reclaim commits (feature/memory-reclaim/5.15)
- vsock commits (fix/vsock/5.15)
Since it’s only available through GitHub right now, you can’t actually install this version yourself easily, as you’ll need to build it from the source code first. If you’re not comfortable doing that, these changes should be coming soon to the stable release of WSL, so you just have to wait a little longer.
