WSL is one of my favorite Windows tools, but it tends to shut itself down quicker than expected.
Why should you keep WSL alive constantly?
My current laptop is an M1 MacBook Air that I received in 2021 in order to graduate college. It is a great machine and the never ending battery life continues to prevent me from looking for a new device. Meanwhile, the machine I’ve most recently acquired is a Beelink SER8 with 64 GB of RAM and 2 TB of storage. This device has a fantastic price to performance ratio and serves my every need, including open source development. It also provides my fiancée and I with a lovely “family” desktop that we share. Because of this, I am hesitant to make the hop to Linux as I want to keep the device as a safe space for backup storage and document processing that my fiancée can also utilize.
With this in mind, my answer to this first question is simple. I want a way to leverage my Fedora Linux terminal in a remote environment. This will turn my lovely M1 into a nice “Linux” development machine on the go. Keeping WSL alive is a key element of this setup. It will allow me to keep a mosh server up and running, ready to access connections from both my phone and my laptop.
My development setup
To continue this mobile/stationary setup discussion, I will briefly run through the technologies I intend to use in my workflow. My goal is to leverage terminal applications. This includes:
- mosh: for stable connections
- NeoVim: for text editing
- tmux: for workspace management
- OpenCode: for AI
3 Layers of WSL modifications
- The first layer is the changes in my .wslconfig. Most of these settings can also be accessed in the update WSL Settings app.
[wsl2]
memory=56294899712
vmIdleTimeout=-1
networkingMode=Mirrored
dnsTunneling=true
[experimental]
autoMemoryReclaim=Disabled
The key settings for keeping the VM alive are vmIdleTimeout and autoMemoryReclaim. The latter prevents further layers from being killed after long idle periods.
- The second layer requires a custom program in the Startup folder in Windows. Easily accessible using Win+R then
shell:startup. I call this file KeepWSLAlive.vbs:
Set WshShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
' This runs the dbus-launch command which forces the WSL instance to stay active
' The 0 at the end tells Windows to run the command in a hidden window
WshShell.Run "wsl --exec dbus-launch true", 0, False
- Finally, for my use case, I launch a mosh server instance.
This requires networkingMode=Mirrored, dnsTunneling=true. This allows my Tailscale on Windows to route packets correctly. It also requires an additional firewall rule set by: New-NetFirewallRule -DisplayName "Allow Mosh UDP" -Direction Inbound -Protocol UDP -LocalPort 60000-60010 -Action Allow.
A short thank you
If you made it to the end of this short post, thank you! I enjoy writing but have been struggling to get this blog up and running. A small post like this is exactly what I needed to push this site from the empty state it has been in!
Disclaimer: while this Hugo site is maintained with the help of AI, no AI was used in the writing of this post.