# Comparing Firmware Development Environments — Linux, Windows, WSL2, and VMWare | Interrupt

**URL:** https://community.memfault.com/t/comparing-firmware-development-environments-linux-windows-wsl2-and-vmware-interrupt/887
**Category:** Blog
**Created:** [October 10, 2024, 7:22pm UTC](https://community.memfault.com/t/comparing-firmware-development-environments-linux-windows-wsl2-and-vmware-interrupt/887 "2024-10-10T19:22:34Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![discobot](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/community.memfault.com/discobot/32/1_2.png) [@discobot](https://community.memfault.com/u/discobot)
#### Post date: [October 10, 2024, 7:22pm UTC](https://community.memfault.com/t/comparing-firmware-development-environments-linux-windows-wsl2-and-vmware-interrupt/887/1 "2024-10-10T19:22:34Z")

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About a year and a half ago, I decided to take a different approach to setting up a Zephyr environment for a new project at [Intercreate](https://www.intercreate.io/). Instead of using my trusty VMWare Workstation Linux VM, I opted for WSL2. I was curious to find out: Would hardware pass-through for debugging work reliably? Would all of the tooling dependencies be supported? What about build system performance?

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at [https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/comparing-fw-dev-envs](https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/comparing-fw-dev-envs)

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### Author: ![tester](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e274bd/32.png) [@tester](https://community.memfault.com/u/tester)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2024, 9:14am UTC](https://community.memfault.com/t/comparing-firmware-development-environments-linux-windows-wsl2-and-vmware-interrupt/887/2 "2024-10-14T09:14:24Z")

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Or simply don’t use Zephyr, where everything is constrained.

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### Author: ![discobot](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/community.memfault.com/discobot/32/1_2.png) [@discobot](https://community.memfault.com/u/discobot)
#### Post date: [October 14, 2024, 9:14am UTC](https://community.memfault.com/t/comparing-firmware-development-environments-linux-windows-wsl2-and-vmware-interrupt/887/3 "2024-10-14T09:14:25Z")

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### Author: ![Strooom](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/community.memfault.com/strooom/32/297_2.png) [@Strooom](https://community.memfault.com/u/Strooom)
#### Post date: [April 5, 2026, 4:05pm UTC](https://community.memfault.com/t/comparing-firmware-development-environments-linux-windows-wsl2-and-vmware-interrupt/887/4 "2026-04-05T16:05:18Z")

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I didn’t spend that much time benchmarking all possible setups, but I learned that my WSL/Ubuntu builds are almost as fast as the Ubuntu server build in my github actions.

This was enough to convince me that the performance of WSL2/Ubuntu is really good.