mccAug 5, 2023
Last year I had Docker briefly running on my Win10 machine, just long enough to verify it was working, then today I ran it and it said it can't run because of my BIOS settings. Is this surprising? Does this imply I changed my BIOS, possibly by accident, sometime in the last nine months? If I changed out my boot disk, might that have reset some BIOS settings?
Show threadmccAug 5, 2023
Follow up question: In my testing, it appeared that Docker Desktop for Windows reserved 2GB of RAM for each of its virtual machines (seemingly due to something about how WSL works). It was not 100% clear to me if this reserved RAM block could be swapped out but I assume not. Do Docker Desktop on Mac and Linux have a similar issue (IE that each VM hardwire-reserves a fixed amount of RAM regardless of how much it is using at any one moment?)
Show threadAlistair Young

@mcc

Unless something has gone very sideways, there should be only one not-quite-VM involved in running Linux containers using Docker Desktop for Windows; the one which runs WSL. Docker runs every container as a Linux namespace (like regular docker) inside a specialized WSL 2 distro, each of which also runs as a Linux namespace inside a single Linux root.

Aug 5, 2023 at 11:35pmWeb
Show threadAlistair YoungAug 5, 2023

@mcc

This memory it uses is mostly swappable. You can check this with Process Explorer or the like - look at the "vmmemWSL" process when it's idle and you can see the working set drop back.

It usually doesn't shrink much below 2GB because it doesn't free the Linux page cache until the Linux kernel frees it, but you can poke this manually with `echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches`

Here for more details: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/memory-reclaim-in-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-2/

Memory Reclaim in the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

We’ve added a new Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature in Windows Insider Preview Build 19013: Memory Reclamation for WSL 2! Previously, when the memory needs of the WSL2 Virtual Machine (VM) would grow, either from your workflow or by the Linux kernel,

Windows Command Line