The Performance Of Ubuntu Software Running On Windows 10 With The New Linux Subsystem

[tigerroast]

Windows doing something good for developers by opening up its walled garden; it's still there, but at least the gates are chained shut no longer.

Ballmer, eat your corrugated forehead out.

[s_j_newbury]

Michael, you wrote: "The stress-ng micro-benchmarks show that the Windows 10 Linux subsystem doesn't actually have that much overhead, unless their kernel is that much faster to make up for the overhead differences."

Since they've actually implemented the syscalls in their kernel, I wouldn't expect any overhead. As mentioned above, I would expect lower performance where they've emulated UNIX file permissions and such, but otherwise it's a pretty fair comparison of the kernels. Really, there shouldn't be a significant difference when running userspace benchmarks, particularly where memory or CPU bound, since the job of the kernel is to just keep out of the way!

[paulpach]

NTFS is one of the biggest (on top of a rather long list) FUBARs in the NT-Kernel. It desperately needs to be fixed. Don't get me started on ReFS etc.
Microsoft should just adopt a real FS instead of the "not written here" mentality bs they keep on pushing.
Filesystems obviously aren't one of Microsofts fortes...

They should add ZFS to windows.
* ZFS is perceived by many to be the best FS out there,
* the CDDL license is fully compatible with windows kernel,
* In many ways, they would leapfrog the file systems that linux has.

[dragorth]

x2, even the latest greatest Microsoft OS's are fantastically deficient in many ways. Redmond is many years behind everyone else in the industry. For example, every major OS out there has a software package manager that tracks all the installed files, with checksums, tracks dependencies, versioning, etc. Except Windows. Every major OS out there has an LVM for storage management. Except Windows. etc. etc

Okay, Microsoft has had an LVM since XP. It just isn't used by default on an install. Why? So users could install Linux.

Microsoft is trying to provide the package manager thing, with 2 strategies. OneGet is a cmd line package manger while the Store is a visual package manager.

[Kano]

The filesystem "emulation" looks very slow, the rest seems to run at pretty good speed. Would be interesting if you can use a full blown desktop if you install an X server - as Windows binary - and set the DISPLAY var correctly. Or maybe let a vncserver run and connect via browser to it.

[Nille]

MS Should add in EXT4 to Windows (and btrfs and many others if they like want). That would be a nice addition and make development easier.

Why? its not one of there Filesystems. But, if you what ext or btrfs you can install the needed FS Driver. For ext are 2 available and one experimental for btrf.

[torsionbar28]

NTFS is one of the biggest (on top of a rather long list) FUBARs in the NT-Kernel. It desperately needs to be fixed. Don't get me started on ReFS etc.
Microsoft should just adopt a real FS instead of the "not written here" mentality bs they keep on pushing.
Filesystems obviously aren't one of Microsofts fortes...

x2, even the latest greatest Microsoft OS's are fantastically deficient in many ways. Redmond is many years behind everyone else in the industry. For example, every major OS out there has a software package manager that tracks all the installed files, with checksums, tracks dependencies, versioning, etc. Except Windows. Every major OS out there has an LVM for storage management. Except Windows. etc. etc

[theriddick]

MS Should add in EXT4 to Windows (and btrfs and many others if they like want). That would be a nice addition and make development easier.

[torsionbar28]

Yes, but can I run it using WINE on an Ubuntu machine??

[chithanh]

assuming NTFS is slower than EXT4, it's not 10-100x slower as the benchmarks show.

Actually, the difference in some cases can be an order of magnitude. This is not because of some translation layer, but instead of the design of filesystems in Windows.

git is another example of software that used the filesystem in a way that performed well on Linux but horribly on Windows. Workarounds have been implemented since to make it perform acceptably fast.