WSL Distro Corruption

[max-legrand]

I have (unfortunately) had the repeated issue of my WSL NixOS distro becoming corrupted after running either a nix-collect-garbage or a nixos-rebuild switch. I believe this is actually a WSL issue and not a NixOS issue specifically, however, I was curious if anyone else has encountered this issue or has a solution? Any help is greatly appreciated as I really would like to keep using Nix in WSL but might have to move to a dedicated VM instance due to the continued and persistent data loss.

[nzbr]

Can you give some more details on what you mean with corrupted? If the distro doesn't start at all, please stop WSL completely with wsl - - shutdown, than try to start NixOS, wait a few seconds and then run dmesg in another distro to get the log output of the NixOS-WSL startup code

[dbalabka]

Here you can find WSL logs: microsoft/WSL#12863

[max-legrand]

When this issue occurs, wsl becomes completely unresponsive and cannot be stopped with wsl --shutdown. The only way to get WSL to become responsive again is a restart of the device, at which point I can query the available distros with wsl -l -v however, any other commands such as trying to enter the distro hangs forever. Like I said, I imagine this is more likely a WSL issue not a NixOS-WSL issue, but I was mostly interested if other have encountered a similar issue (since I've only encountered this while using NixOS)

[dbalabka]

@max-legrand , I have the same problem. Please see microsoft/WSL#12863

[dbalabka]

I tried to install the latest version of NixOS and corrupted my entire WSL environment. The bug is reported to WSL
microsoft/WSL#12863

Now I get the following error:

wsl --list                                                                        Failed to read property 'DistributionName' from distribution {afcbef87-9353-40c3-ac8c-3d22772ce276}
Error code: Wsl/EnumerateDistros/Service/ReadDistroConfig/E_UNEXPECTED

It seems like it is related to corrupted Registry:
microsoft/WSL#12822
However, I'm not sure how to fix it

[dbalabka]

@max-legrand here is a solution: microsoft/WSL#12822 (comment)