WSL2

Warning “wsl2” mode is experimental

⚡ Requirement	Lima >= 0.18 + (Windows >= 10 Build 19041 OR Windows 11)

“wsl2” option makes use of native virtualization support provided by Windows’ wsl.exe (more info).

An example configuration:

limactl start --vm-type=wsl2 --mount-type=wsl2 --containerd=system

# Example to run Fedora using vmType: wsl2
vmType: wsl2
images:
# Source: https://github.com/runfinch/finch-core/blob/main/Dockerfile
- location: "https://deps.runfinch.com/common/x86-64/finch-rootfs-production-amd64-1690920103.tar.zst"
  arch: "x86_64"
  digest: "sha256:53f2e329b8da0f6a25e025d1f6cc262ae228402ba615ad095739b2f0ec6babc9"
mountType: wsl2
containerd:
  system: true
  user: false

Caveats

“wsl2” option is only supported on newer versions of Windows (roughly anything since 2019)

Known Issues

“wsl2” currently doesn’t support many of Lima’s options. See this file for the latest supported options.
When running lima using “wsl2”, ${LIMA_HOME}/<INSTANCE>/serial.log will not contain kernel boot logs
WSL2 requires a tar formatted rootfs archive instead of a VM image
Windows doesn’t ship with ssh.exe, gzip.exe, etc. which are used by Lima at various points. The easiest way around this is to run winget install -e --id Git.MinGit (winget is now built in to Windows as well), and add the resulting C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\ directory to your path.

Last modified September 5, 2025: docs/config/vmtype: split to multiple pages (b11fe116)