Systemd

“This Should Be Quick” Famous last words. After implementing basic networking support and learning about WSL2’s shared network architecture, I wanted to make it work reliably across multiple distributions. The plan: add integration tests, support more distros (Debian, Fedora, AlmaLinux, Kali, openSUSE), and document the limitations properly. What I thought would be a quick Sunday afternoon turned into a deep dive into systemd services, DNS resolution, and why background processes in SSH are surprisingly hard. ...

Introduction Over the past few days, I’ve been working on adding Docker support to the vagrant-wsl2-provider plugin. This turned out to be more challenging than expected, but the journey taught me a lot about WSL2’s internals, systemd initialization, and multi-distribution package management. In this post, I’ll walk through the development process, the challenges we faced, and how we solved them to get Docker running on 8 different Linux distributions in WSL2 through Vagrant. ...