https://luth.io/tags/hcs/ Recent content in Hcs on Luther Monson Hugo en Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:12:00 -0700 https://luth.io/blog/2026/06/escaping-wsl-hcs-linux-vm/ Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:12:00 -0700 https://luth.io/blog/2026/06/escaping-wsl-hcs-linux-vm/ <p>I&rsquo;ve been building <a href="https://github.com/ephpm/ephemerd">ephemerd</a>, a daemon that runs self-hosted GitHub Actions runners with a fresh environment per job. On a Windows host, Windows jobs run in Hyper-V isolated containers. Linux jobs still need a Linux kernel from somewhere. The obvious answer on Windows in 2026 is WSL2, and that&rsquo;s what I used first. It worked great from my terminal and fell over the moment ephemerd became a real Windows service.</p> <h3 id="wsl2-doesnt-do-localsystem">WSL2 doesn&rsquo;t do LocalSystem</h3> <p>A Windows service that wants to create containers and Hyper-V VMs runs as <code>LocalSystem</code>. WSL2 doesn&rsquo;t support that context at all. You get <code>WSL_E_LOCAL_SYSTEM_NOT_SUPPORTED</code> and that&rsquo;s the end of the conversation. There&rsquo;s no flag for it. WSL is a per-user feature and a service account isn&rsquo;t a user.</p>