General concepts - Azure/iotedge-eflow GitHub Wiki
- What is Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows?
- What are the benefits of using EFLOW?
- How is EFLOW different from Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)?
- Where can I find the official documentation?
- Where can I find the release notes for versions?
- What are the steps to deploy an EFLOW instance?
- Does EFLOW supports Azure IoT Edge 1.2?
- Will Windows continue to support Windows Azure IoT Edge?
Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows (EFLOW) is a solution that allows you to run containerized Linux workloads alongside Windows applications in Windows IoT deployments. Businesses that rely on Windows IoT to power their edge devices can now take advantage of the cloud-native analytics solutions being built in Linux. For more information, review EFLOW docs.
Review our Benefits section for more information.
The EFLOW VM is a standard Gen2 VM sitting on top of Hyper-V, based on CBL Mariner, which uses SystemD as its process manager that is required to run Azure IoT Edge to spawn off child processes like Docker Moby and manage containerized processes. EFLOW users aren't able to launch an EFLOW VM directly from Hyper-V. The only way an admin can access the EFLOW environment is to SSH into it using the Ssh-EflowVm PowerShell command. For more information about architecture, see Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows docs.
WSL2 ships with a standard Linux Kernel that is provided by the same team contributes to the CBL Mariner kernel. This is perhaps one of the only similarities. The user land for WSL2 comes from a store package that allows the WSL2 environment to morph. It could be based on Alpine, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Kali, or Debian. It's up to the device admin to choose which Linux experience they want. Since not all of these user land offerings support SystemD, WSL2 uses SysINIT as its process manager to spin up one process at a time.
Check out our official documentation for Azure IoT Edge for Linux on Windows.
Each version will have its own release notes published on our EFLOW GitHub page. You can check the versions in the Releases section.
Review the Install and provision Azure IoT Edge for Linux on a Windows device guide for installing and provisioning Azure EFLOW on a Windows device.
Yes, our latest EFLOW Continous Release (CR) version it's based on Azure IoT Edge 1.2. For more information, check Azure EFLOW CR.
Azure IoT Edge for Windows won't be supported starting with version 1.2.0 of Azure IoT Edge. For more information, see the Azure IoT Edge Docs.