I have very little memory on this host, so I’m working on a remote host. I often find that WSL starts up automatically.

Until I found this in the Dev Containers logs

...
[4358 ms] Start: Run: docker inspect --type container /beautiful_jepsen
[4516 ms] Start: Run: wsl -l -v
[4978 ms] Start: Run: wsl -d Ubuntu -e /bin/sh -c echo ~
[17414 ms] Start: Run: wsl -d Ubuntu -e /bin/sh -c cd '/home/user' && /bin/sh
[17423 ms] Start: Run in host: id -un
[17797 ms] user
...

I’m connecting to a container on a remote host, why do I need to turn on the local WSL？

The logs of the port forwarding made me think it had to be forwarded twice.

... 
[4512098 ms] Port forwarding 50684 > 46051 > 46051 stderr: Connection established
[4512117 ms] Port forwarding 50686 > 46051 > 46051 stderr: Connection established
[4512167 ms] Port forwarding 50688 > 46051 > 46051 stderr: Connection established
[4512201 ms] Port forwarding 50690 > 46051 > 46051 stderr: Connection established
...

After ‘wsl –shutdown’

[2191307 ms] Host server terminated (code: 1, signal: null).

But the remote connection and port forwarding were not interrupted.

So turning on the local WSL doesn’t do anything.