This is the second time I am having this problem. After turning on my laptop (desktop 😀), WSL will not respond to any command. It will hang indefinitely. This time, I am going to share how I “solved” it.

There is an issue on the WSL github repo on this problem, but it seems there is a difficulty reproducing the bug. A temporary solution suggested bymmichal3 is to kill the WSL process from task manager.

Solution: Kill WSL Process

You can kill the WSL process the task manager way, but I prefer using CLI for this, as it’s more precise. The command for killing a process on windows is taskkill and tasklist is for listing all running processes.

If you run tasklist in powershell, you’ll see 3 different processes that are related to WSL:

  1. wsl.exe
  2. wslhost.exe and
  3. wslservice.exe

Side note: I was shocked at the amount of processes running when I executed tasklist.

The process you want to kill is wslservice.exe. You need an elevated powershell to be able to kill it and you have to forcefully kill it.

To get an elevated powershell, press windows button and search for powershell. Then right click and click on run as administrator.

Here is the command to forcefully kill wslservice.exe:

taskkill -F -IM wslservice.exe

With this, you can open your WSL the way you are used to, and it will hopefully work.