what time can support windows?

[NiZerin]

just like title, what time can support windows?

[AkihiroSuda]

Not in foreseeable future, but depends on contribution from the community

[route33]

What about under MSYS2?

❯ make && make install
mkdir -p _output/bin
cp -a ./cmd/lima _output/bin/lima

The hostagent must be compiled with CGO_ENABLED=1 so that net.LookupIP() in the DNS server

calls the native resolver library and not the simplistic version in the Go library.

CGO_ENABLED=1 go build -ldflags="-s -w -X github.com/lima-vm/lima/pkg/version.Version=v0.7.4-4-g61d57bb" -o _output/bin/limactl ./cmd/limactl

github.com/lima-vm/lima/pkg/lockutil

pkg\lockutil\lockutil.go:34:27: undefined: unix.LOCK_EX
pkg\lockutil\lockutil.go:38:28: undefined: unix.LOCK_UN
pkg\lockutil\lockutil.go:48:10: undefined: unix.Flock
pkg\lockutil\lockutil.go:49:27: undefined: unix.EINTR

github.com/lima-vm/lima/pkg/networks

pkg\networks\validate.go:76:25: undefined: syscall.Stat_t
make: *** [Makefile:44: _output/bin/limactl] Error 2

[afbjorklund]

Msys2 is Windows, but you might try WSL instead ? (it is Linux and similar to Lima)

[route33]

Yeah, I could tell the story of my life, I'm a mac user, forced by the company I work for to use Windows. WSL is not so great and got stuck with msys2 for the bare minimum.
I'm going to try the old fashioned VirtualBox.
Thanks anyway.

[afbjorklund]

QEMU does work on Windows, I have a basic VM running - but not all the bells and whistles of Lima...
If you want to play along, there are QEMU binaries with WHPX available at: https://qemu.weilnetz.de/

Initially one effort will be to change the "unix socket" over to a "named pipe", for running on Windows.
I like msys2 and brew, they give a more familiar environment when working in Windows and macOS.

[jandubois]

@route33 Depending on your needs you could check out Rancher Desktop on Windows. It uses Lima on Linux and macOS, and WSL2 on Windows to provide a container runtime and k8s.

It is also an open source project, and but still relatively newish, so may not yet provide exactly what you want.

[jandubois]

I don't have a comprehensive list, just some observations:

• All WSL2 "distros" run inside namespaces inside the same VM. They share CPU and memory limits and the network (not namespaced). This is both good and bad. 😄
• The IP address of your VM changes every time you restart Windows (or maybe even just the VM), which can be a pain for certs.
• There are various unresolved conflicts with VPNs that you have to work around. Not sure who is to blame here (which may be the reason it is still not fixed).
• WSL2 doesn't have an init system
• Each distro is put to sleep quite aggressively if WSL2 determines there is nothing running in it.

There is probably more; this is from the top of my head. I still think it is pretty great, and really good enough that I don't see a reason why you would need Lima on Windows.

One big advantage for WSL2 is that it can use Hyper-V even with Windows Home. To run your own VMs on Hyper-V you would otherwise need at least a Windows Pro license.

[afbjorklund]

I guess it (WSL model) is more similar in usage to Docker Desktop, as opposed to the "machine" model from Docker Toolbox

I have only casually compared it to Cygwin, so not the best judge... But I did notice that the container-based WSL1 "failed".

[afbjorklund]

My main reason for trying to run Podman (and maybe eventually also Lima?) on Windows, was more of a "why not" ... 🙃

It didn't have a use case, and most certainly not a business case. All I know so far is that QEMU works. And ssh, I suppose.

[jandubois]

All I know so far is that QEMU works. And ssh, I suppose.

Yeah, but what are the advantages over using just WSL2, which has already "solved" the issue of shared filesystems for you? And doesn't really need ssh because you can already run wsl -d MYDISTRO uname -a or whatever.

[afbjorklund]

I don't really know how WSL2 and wsl are being implemented, but I do know where to look and what syntax to use for lima and friends... In terms of filesystem I think it didn't even have virtfs, so most likely it would be sshfs (at best). I know slirp (user net) works, not sure about the rest. And Red Hat came to a similar conclusion about Podman, they use WSL2 (*) and don't support Windows.