I'd like to understand why the Windows filesystem is mounted on WSL with noexec and nodev options.

[ishuah]

I'm asking this question because I'm curious and I want to understand WSL better.

My environment is Windows 11, using WSL 2 running Ubuntu. I'm learning container fundamentals and I've encountered an interesting error when running debootstrap.

When I run it in the mounted Windows filesystem (/mnt/c/):

user@laptop:/mnt/c/Users/user/workshop$ sudo debootstrap --arch amd64 jammy container_fs http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu

I get the following error:

mknod: /mnt/c/Users/user/workshop/container_fs/test-dev-null: Operation not supported
E: Cannot install into target '/mnt/c/Users/user/workshop/container_fs' mounted with noexec or nodev

I tried to remount /mnt/c/Users/user/workshop/container_fs with exec and dev options.

user@laptop:/mnt/c/Users/user/workshop$ sudo mount -o remount,exec,dev /mnt/c/Users/user/workshop/container_fs

Output:

mount: /mnt/c/Users/user/workshop/container_fs: mount point not mounted or bad option.

It was at this point that I tried running debootstrap on /home/user/ and it worked without any issues.

[NotTheDr01ds]

Answered in detail on your Super User post. Summary:

• 9P doesn't support mknod

[ishuah]

Thank you @NotTheDr01ds!