Microsoft launched the “Windows Subsystem for Linux” in 2016, adding an optional Linux environment to every operating system since Windows 10. But now an open source developer has brought Linux to Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me. informs the blog It is free software“with the Linux 6.19 kernel running alongside the Windows 9x kernel, allowing both to run on the same machine at the same time.”
A virtual device driver handles initialization, loads the kernel off disk, and manages the event loop for page faults and system calls. Since Win9x lacks proper interrupt table support for the standard Linux system call interrupt, WSL9x redirects those calls through the fault handler. Rounding it out is wsl.com, a small 16-bit DOS program that pipes terminal output from Linux to whatever MS-DOS window you’ve run it from.
The end result is that WSL9x It does not require hardware virtualization and can run on hardware as old as the i486, the article notes. in mastodon the developer says they “actually placed it right under the cable, before starting removing 486 support from Linux“.
The WSL9x source code is released under the GPL-3 license and was “proudly written without AI.”
