WSL2 make available/visible all Windows' network adapters inside Ubuntu

I have a Windows 10 with installed WSL2. In WSL2 I have an Ubuntu. I need to work directly from Ubuntu with different adapters that I have in my physical PC and have access to them from Windows. But in WSL2 I have only one virtual adapter. And do not see other adapters when run ifconfig -a. Is there a way to make available/visible all Windows' network adapters inside Ubuntu?

Use case: I have PC with many adapters that physically are connected to the different devices. I need to send signals(requests) to these devices.

As you've seen, WSL1 gives you a better mapping of Windows interfaces to "Linux interfaces", but it's important to understand the differences between WSL1 and WSL2 in this regard:

• Under WSL1, when a Linux app calls a Linux API, WSL1 is responsible for trying to map this to Windows APIs. So when ifconfig (or ip) trys to call getifaddrs to get the available interfaces, WSL1 pops in the list that the Windows kernel knows about.

• WSL2, on the other hand, is running a real Linux kernel in a virtualized environment (a subset of Hyper-V). A getifaddrs there enumerates the interfaces that the virtual machine provides to the Linux kernel.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both:

• The biggest problem in WSL1 is that you are going to be very limited in what you can do with these interfaces. Microsoft's Windows->Linux API mapping only goes so deep when it comes to hardware.

  For instance, even a very basic task like bringing an interface up or down isn't going to work. E.g. sudo ip link set wifi0 down will always return RTNETLINK answers: Operation not permitted. You can't put the interface into promiscuous mode, run WireShark, or anything like that.

• And WSL2's virtualization means, of course, that you don't even see the Windows interfaces when calling Linux commands. On the other hand, you get full access to the virtual interfaces.

There may be some WSL2 possibilities for you, depending on your use-case. You mentioned in the comments (hopefully to be migrated to the question itself) that you have multiple interfaces installed, with each connected to a different endpoint device.

The simplest scenario, if it works for you, would simply be to assign a different subnet to each interface in Windows and rely on Windows routing table to handle the packets to the devices based on their IP address. The virtual interface in WSL2 should "just work" and send the packets out to the Windows host for the correct routing.

If that doesn't work, then check out socat as another option. There's a Windows version available (although I haven't tried it), along with the standard Linux one that you'll find available in most distributions. I've had success creating TAP/TUN devices in WSL2 that map to other endpoints, although it's been a while since I've done it and don't quite remember the details off the top of my head. In theory, you could shuffle packages between a socat running on WSL2 and one running on the Windows host itself for more complicated use-cases.

And while it's not part of your use-case, I'll mention this for others who might read this, since it relates to the question. If you need to do something like enable or disable a Windows interface from within WSL (either 1 or 2) for some reason, consider calling out through powershell.exe. E.g.:

powershell.exe -c "Disable-NetAdapter  -name 'Wi-Fi'"

Note that this would need to be done in a UAC-elevated terminal, since WSL cannot do anything (even as root) that your Windows user can't do. Also note that in a UAC-elevated session, you may need to specify the full path to powershell.exe.

Finally, and I say this simply because I've seen some folks be critical of WSL limitations recently, I don't see any of this as a limitation of WSL. You'd run into the same issue with virtual interfaces if running under VMWare, VirtualBox, or any other virtualization environment. IMHO, WSL gives us quite a few more options to at least attempt to deal with this than other virtualization environments do.

Downgrading of WSL version to 1.0 helped to get the same adapter inside Ubuntu. Please, add comments if there is a way to make it in 2.0 version