Yes, You Can Run WSL on Windows 95

We WILL Look At You Funny Though

2026 is a year filled with people doing things they can, but maybe shouldn’t, and WSL9x is more proof of that.  A mad scientist calling herself Hailey has successfully integrated the 6.19 Linux kernel into Windows 95, in an abomination she has dubbed Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux.  The readme, which is posted on Codeberg describes how this was done; though not why.  There is a Linux kernel patched to call Windows 9x APIs instead of POSIX ones, a VxD (virtual device) driver, and a WSL client itself. 

That virtual device does most of the work because Windows 95 does not have an interrupt descriptor table anywhere near long enough to deal with things like syscall interrupts for Linux.  The WSL client is a tiny 16-bit DOS program which passes DOS prompts to the Linux kernel as TTY instead of being a fully-fledged custom client that Windows 95 wouldn’t have a clue what to do with.

Be warned that this obscenity does have a small security issue, as the Linux kernel shares the same Ring 0 CPU privileges that the Windows kernel does, and it is apparently not 100% stable.   That at least reassures us that not all traces of reality have been wiped from existence.