"The VxD driver does a lot of the heavy lifting and is responsible for initializing WSL9x as well as handling userspace events that have to be relayed to the kernel (i.e., page faults and syscalls), which it does in a rather interesting way due to limitations in the Win9x architecture."
"Syscalls are handled via the general protection fault handler, as Win9x does not have an interrupt descriptor table long enough to install a proper handler for int 0x80, which is the i386 syscall interrupt for Linux."
"The GPF handler in WSL9x keeps an eye on faulting instructions, and when it sees int 0x80 pop up, it advances the instruction pointer as if the interrupt succeeded and dispatches as a syscall to Linux."
WSL9x allows users to run the 6.19 Linux kernel on Windows 9x systems, providing a terminal-based experience akin to modern Windows Subsystem for Linux. The system consists of three components: a patched Linux kernel, a virtual device driver (VxD), and a WSL client. The VxD driver initializes WSL9x and manages userspace events, while syscalls are handled through a general protection fault handler due to limitations in the Windows 9x architecture.
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