Windows 11 WSL 2 is almost as quick as running Linux natively
In certain tests, Linux under WSL 2 performed better than it did on bare metal
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The performance of Ubuntu Linux run using the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) under the upcomingWindows 11release was a close match to the performance of the distro run on bare metal, according to a new benchmark.
Following up in their benchmarkcomparing Windows 11 against Linux,Phoronixtried to gauge the improvements of the WSL2 subsystems of the upcoming Windows release, by pitting it against nativeUbuntu 20.04, and the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 installations.
“Out of 130 tests in total,Windows 11WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS managed to run at 94% the speed of bare metal Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on the same system,” observesPhoronix.
Impressed by the performance,Phoronixmakes it a point to highlight the CPU/system benchmarks where WSL2 delivered comparable performance to the natively-running Ubuntu installation.
Encouraging results
The benchmarks were conducted using theopen sourcePhoronix Test Suite running on anAMD Ryzen 9 5900Xsystem with the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HEROmotherboardequipped with 16GB ofRAM, 1TB WD_BLACK SN850 NVMeSSD, and aGeForce RTX 3090graphics card.
The tests revealed some interesting results. For instance, under heavy workloads, WSL2 showed some overhead compared to bare metal Ubuntu Linux as expected. However, for some HPC workloads like Rodinia, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS under WSL 2 performed almost at par as bare metal Ubuntu, and in some cases even came out ahead.
In the same vein, the performance of most moderate CPU workloads that aren’t I/O or memory intensive, the WSL2 Ubuntu performance was virtually the same as that of its bare metal counterpart.
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“Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 overall has matured quite well and for most workloads is delivering acceptable performance atop Windows 11,” concludesPhoronix, pointing out that while the tests were done on a still-cooking Windows 11 “Dev” channel release (Windows 11 22454.1000) they’ll be repeated once Windows 11 is released in October.
ViaPhoronix
With almost two decades of writing and reporting on Linux, Mayank Sharma would like everyone to think he’sTechRadar Pro’sexpert on the topic. Of course, he’s just as interested in other computing topics, particularly cybersecurity, cloud, containers, and coding.
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