Windows 10 WSL: Ubuntu vs. openSUSE Leap Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Operating Systems on 4 August 2017 at 12:19 PM EDT. Page 1 of 4. 8 Comments.

Following my recent Windows 10 WSL CPU scaling benchmarks to see how well Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux for running native Linux binaries compared to various distributions, I did a comparison of Ubuntu and openSUSE on WSL compared to running these distributions bare metal.

Recently from the Microsoft Windows Store, Ubuntu is now available for easily making use of WSL while also openSUSE has been added as an alternative Linux environment. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server is also available, but given it's built off the same code-base as openSUSE Leap, I just tested openSUSE. Fedora from the Windows Store was not yet available when trying this testing.

Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview Build 16251.rs3_release.170721-2122 was used for this latest round of Windows WSL vs. Linux benchmarking. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and openSUSE Leap 42.2 were tested via Windows WSL before replacing the Windows 10 installation and doing clean "bare metal" installs of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and openSUSE Leap 42.2 on the system itself to see how the performance differs.

The same system was used throughout the entire testing process and included the Intel Core i9 7900X running at stock speeds, 16GB DDR4 memory, 250GB Corsair Force MP500 NVMe SSD, and MSI X299 SLI PLUS motherboard.

Windows 10 WSL Benchmarks - Ubuntu 16.04 vs. openSUSE Leap

All of these benchmarks under Windows 10 and Linux were done in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.


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