New Explorer integration edge cases - /mnt/

[refack]

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Please fill out the below information:

• Your Windows build number: 10.0.18836.1000

• What you're doing and what's happening:

  1. Open Windows Explorer
  2. Browse to one the WSL distros
  3. Browse to /mnt/
  4. Click on any mount point

• What's wrong / what should be happening instead:

  • Network Error 0x80070035

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BTW browsing to the regular storage location shows the mount points empty, but working:

[SvenGroot]

This is by design. We don't let you navigate into DrvFs mount points through \\wsl$, for several reasons:

• Access would use the security context of the WSL init process, not the security context of the process accessing the file.
• In some cases, we found recursive file system access could lead to hangs or long delays.
• There is no benefit to doing this, since the files are available in Windows anyway so all this does is provide you with a much slower way of accessing those files.

Going directly through rootfs is showing you the mount point directories, but the actual mounts only exist in WSL so of course they're not visible there.

[refack]

Going directly through rootfs is showing you the mount point directories, but the actual mounts only exist in WSL so of course they're not visible there.

That's what I'd expect as well (empty folder). An exception IMHO is a no no ¯\(ツ)/¯

[therealkenc]

• There is no benefit to doing this, since the files are available in Windows anyway so all this does is provide you with a much slower way of accessing those files.

That's semantically equivalent to saying there is no benefit to mount --bind in Linux because the files are there anyway.

But beggars can't be choosers and you get 100 points for the integration anyway. Nice work Sven. 💯

[SvenGroot]

@therealkenc However, mount --bind does not make you go through a communications protocol and an extra layer of abstraction (the WSL VFS layer), using potentially the wrong security context, and removing a bunch of features of the underlying file system (since not everything NTFS does is supported through WSL or the \\wsl$ view). 😉

[therealkenc]

Yeah. I "get it". So.... counting commas... is that three new User Voice entries or would just the one do? [don't answer that] 🐱‍👤

Again nice work.

[Biswa96]

SO why Plan9, not SMB? There are multiple layers in this P9 implementation: LxssManager.dll --> p9np.dll --> p9rdr.sys --> rdbss.sys, any I/O performance issue for that?