Winboat is a new technology to run Windows apps on Linux. If the developers can deliver, this will be a game changer.

Luckily for us there's the GitHub-hosted Linux Surface project, which has built a Surface-optimised kernel that's a drop-in replacement for most existing distros.

Downloading/building the kernel on my Linux box will pretty much fill up that box's hard drive. So, can I set up a virtual machine on my Windows 8.1 box to develop my kernel module on?

Version 2 requires virtualization support on your computer, but operates much much faster. It also provides a real Linux kernel, so most everything will run using WSL2.