opensafely
Improve documentation for installing docker on Windows Home
This is what the official docs have to say:
- Hyper-V and Containers Windows features must be enabled.
- The following hardware prerequisites are required to successfully run Client Hyper-V on Windows 10:
- 64 bit processor with Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)
- 4GB system RAM
- BIOS-level hardware virtualization support must be enabled in the BIOS settings. For more information, see Virtualization.
Our test user has a "very late" build of Windows 10 Home: they went through the requirements trying to find out if they had SLAT. They added:
I couldn’t get the virtualization stuff to work either.
There were a series of more & more complex things for a simpleton like me to do with Hyper-V and Containers Windows. I also enabled WSL1 but didn’t get WSL2 to go.
I don’t know if I was close to getting it going, but each time I got something, I found there was another 2 levels to negotiate.
You probably know - in my opinion it's much better if the user installs WSL 2 if they can as Docker Desktop will use the WSL 2 engine (I want to say kernel) , in the Docker Desktop settings check the "Use WSL 2 based engine" box.
WSL 2 system calls run much faster than WSL 1.
~~ @remlapmot , https://github.com/opensafely-core/opensafely-cli/issues/41#issuecomment-802013525
Windows Home doesn't have Hyper-V support.
But installation on Windows Home should be simpler now: Windows Home does support WSL2 and WSL2 is now the default recommendation from Docker for Docker Desktop. You do still require hardware that supports virtualisation (in other words, Intel VT-x or AMD-V), and that feature to be enabled in the BIOS, if it isn't by default.
