I have been waiting in anticipation for WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) and on May 28th when the update released for general availability I updated immediately.

At first I was super hyped. WSL2 and the Ubuntu 20.04 image just worked and ran smoothly and quickly. Combined it with the release version of Windows Terminal it was a real delight.

Simple fix – just update Workstation to 15.5.5 and reboot and WSL2 and Workstation now coexisted fine! I played a bit more with WSL2 in the following days but ended up hitting some wierd issues where networking would stop working in the WSL2 image. No real fixes found. Many indicate DNS issues and stuff like that.

• When you connect to Cisco Anyconnect WSL2 will NAT to the highest priority Ethernet Adapter. Expected: commands that require internet work as WSL 1. From the speed improvement and the Docker integration, developing on Windows has never been better. Curl Router by IP or global Cloud service by name. On Line 2 in quotes).
• Apr 17, 2021 Anyconnect is probably stepping on something in vEthernet. My working theory is that Anyconnect is intercepting WSL2 traffic, so it doesn't properly go through vEthernet, and responses don't make it back.
• So I can get X11 forwarding working in WSL2 following e.g., How to set up working X11 forwarding on WSL2. Then I had issues getting networking to function after connecting to a Cisco AnyConnect server, but I solved that using, e.g., WSL 2 Cisco AnyConnect Networking Workaround.
• Simple fix – just update Workstation to 15.5.5 and reboot and WSL2 and Workstation now coexisted fine! I played a bit more with WSL2 in the following days but ended up hitting some wierd issues where networking would stop working in the WSL2 image. No real fixes found. Many indicate DNS issues and stuff like that.

I also went and grabbed Docker Desktop for Windows as it now has support for WSL2 as the underlying system. And joy it just installed and worked. Now being capable of running Docker containers directly from my shell without doing some of doing it the way I did before having a Ubuntu VM running in VMware Workstation and connecting to it via docker-machine on my WSL1 Ubuntu image. A hassle to get to work and not a very smooth operation.

Having the option to just start Docker containers is amazing!

But then I had to get some actual work done and booted up VMware Workstation to boot a VM. And it failed. With a Device Guard error. I followed the guides and attempted to disable Device Guard to no avail. Then it dawned on my. WSL2 probably enables the Hyper-V role! And that is exactly what happened.

Hyper-V and Workstation (or VirtualBox for that matter) do not mix well – that is until VMware released Workstation 15.5.5 to fix this exact problem just the day after WSL2 released. Perfect timing!

Simple fix – just update Workstation to 15.5.5 and reboot and WSL2 and Workstation now coexisted fine!

I played a bit more with WSL2 in the following days but ended up hitting some wierd issues where networking would stop working in the WSL2 image. No real fixes found. Many indicate DNS issues and stuff like that. Just Google “WSL2 DNS not working” and look at the mountains of issues.

But I suspected something else because DNS not working was just a symptom – routing out of the WSL2 image was not working. Pinging IPs outside the image did not work. Not even the gateway IP. And if the default gateway is not working of course DNS is not working.

I found that restarting fixed the issue so got past it that way but today it was back. I was very interested in figuring out what happened. And then I realized the potential problem and tested the fix. I was connected to my work network via Cisco AnyConnect. I tried disconnecting from VPN and testing connectivity in WSL again – now it works. Connected to VPN again and connectivity was gone.

Okay – source found – what’s the fix? I found this thread on Github that mentions issues with other VPN providers even when not connected. Looking through the comments I found a reference to a different issue of the same problem but regarding AnyConnect specifically.

I looked through the comments and many fixes around changing DNS IP and other things but the fix that seem to do the trick was running the following two lines of Powershell in an elevated shell after connecting to VPN

Those two lines change the Interface Metric so that the WSL interface has a higher priority than the VPN connection. This inadvertently also fixed an issue that I had with local breakout when on VPN not working correctly.

Downside of the fix is that this needs to be run every time you connect to VPN. I implemented a simple Powershell function in my profile so I just have to open an elevated shell and type “Fix-WSLNet”.

That is all for now!

Vpn Wsl2

Back in may of last year I was tripping to get my hands on WSL2 with the new backend and improved performance. I wrote a few blogposts about it and even wrote my, to date, most viewed and commented post about it (WSL2 issues – and how to fix some of them).

Now the issue that hurt me the most at first was Workstation 15.5 was not able to run with WSL2 installed as this enabled the Hyper-V features of Windows 10 which collide with Workstation.

The day after WSL2 released VMware pushed 15.5.5 which allowed Workstation to run even with Hyper-V enabled but at greatly reduced performance – just Google it and be amazed.

Wsl2 Cannot Access Internet

It does not really come as a surprise as having Workstation (A virtualization engine) run on top of Hyper-V (also a virtualization engine) on top of hardware is not a recipe for performance!

As a result I have not been using my Windows 10 VM that much the last many months – until now!

I got my hands on a Workstation 16 Pro license and went in for an upgrade to see if any of the improvements in 16.1 would alleviate some of my performance issues. And after completing the install which prompted me to enable the Windows Hypervisor Platform I spun up my Windows 10 machine from suspend. I quickly got a popup noting me that I had “side channel mitigations” enabled as show below here:

Cisco Anyconnect Wsl2 Login

Now from working with vSphere I realize that many of the side channel mitigations can have heavy impact on performance so I updated my Windows 10 OS and shut it down and followed KB79832 as linked in the popup to disable the mitigations.

I powered on my VM again and could immediately feel the difference. I may not have the exact same performance I had with 15.5 on an non-Hyper-V enabled host but it is a LOT better than it was. Major problem now seems to be that fact that my tiny i7-7600U dual core CPU can’t keep up! Dear Dell when are you rolling out some Latitude’s with Ryzen 7 5800U’s??