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How to build a custom kernel for WSL in 2025

Thanks to the WSL System Distro, we no longer need distro-specific instructions to build a WSL custom kernel. A standard, ephemeral build environment is right there, on every WSL installation.

Move to your local home folder inside the WSL file system to improve build performance: If you copied the default WSL2 kernel config file to.config, you can now edit using your preferred text editor, such as nano, vim, or emacs. Make you want to open another tab, drop into the System Distro, install htop, and see all the magic happening:

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