WSL2 stuck at boot with continuous memory consumption

[rt265]

Windows Version

Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.26200.8737]

WSL Version

2.9.3.0

Are you using WSL 1 or WSL 2?

• WSL 2
• WSL 1

Kernel Version

6.18.35.2-1

Distro Version

Ubuntu 26.04

Other Software

.wslconfig:

[wsl2]
networkingMode=mirrored
processors=8
memory=8GB
swap=4GB

Repro Steps

Run wsl or select Ubuntu in Windows Terminal

Expected Behavior

Ubuntu runs normally.

Actual Behavior

Ubuntu fails to boot under WSL2. The VmmemWSL process continuously consumes all available physical memory until the system becomes unresponsive.

The image below shows the situation before taskmgr freezes.

wsl --shutdown does not terminate the process. Windows native "Shut down" and "Restart" options also become unresponsive, forcing a hard power-off as the only recovery method.

Diagnostic Logs

WslLogs-2026-07-08_15-43-54.tar.gz

[github-actions]

No logs.etl found in the archive. Make sure that you ran collect-wsl-logs.ps1 as administrator and that the logs.etl file is in the archive.

Diagnostic information

.wslconfig found
Detected appx version: 2.9.3.0
No logs.etl found in archive.
Error while parsing the logs. See action page for details

[rt265]

wsl_mem_fix.zip Man, that mirrored networking mode is a total killer for memory management in the latest build. I ran into the same Vmmem spike until I applied this kernel patch that caps the allocation leak during the handshake. It finally stopped my rig from freezing up.

Just a check

[github-actions]

No logs.etl found in the archive. Make sure that you ran collect-wsl-logs.ps1 as administrator and that the logs.etl file is in the archive.

Diagnostic information

appxpackage.txt not found
optional-components.txt not found
No logs.etl found in archive.
Error while parsing the logs. See action page for details

[chemwolf6922]

Hi @rt265 . The event log is missing from your log. Could you please recollect the log and repro the issue? Thanks.

You will need to end the log collection before the system freeze.

[rt265]

WslLogs-2026-07-08_17-22-27.tar.gz

[github-actions]

Diagnostic information

.wslconfig found
Detected appx version: 2.9.3.0

[chemwolf6922]

The log shows the landscape-client.service stuck during boot. This will slow down the distro startup but should not block it indefinitely.
If you are not using it and can still get into wsl. Please consider disable this systemd service and see if anything changes.

[chemwolf6922]

The log also shows a packet storm between 10.133.21.255:41380 (a local port) and 185.125.188.55:443 (remote server) at a super high frequency that's not possible for external network traffic.
Could you please recollect the log with the network profile enabled? Thanks.

collect-wsl-logs.ps1 -LogProfile networking

[rt265]

Thank you. .\collect-wsl-logs.ps1 -LogProfile networking may start a new WSL instance, so sometimes the new WSL instance stuck my system directly.

But there are several times that Ubuntu could boot. So I have run sudo systemctl disable landscape-client.service. Nothing seems to change. After running this command or sudo apt update, Ubuntu started to eat memory, then system stuck. And it caused that I can't sudo apt install iptables tcpdump

Anyway, collect-wsl-logs.ps1 -LogProfile networking does have some records, but when I tried to stop logging, the script informed that it's timeout, which system was almost OOM. I'm afraid that the log is incomplete.

Files are so big that Github does not support to upload, so I uploaded 2 logs to Google Driver.
WslLogs-2026-07-09_16-11-23.tar.gz (The only record saving as a .tar.gz file)
WslLogs-2026-07-09_16-21-28.zip (It's not compressed originally. I chose it because of a very big wfpdiag.xml file - 2.78GB)