Windows 10 May 2020 Performance For WSL vs. WSL2

For those curious about the performance of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with the recently released Windows 10 May 2020 Update, here are benchmarks of Ubuntu 20.04 on both WSL and WSL2 compared to the bare metal Ubuntu 20.04 LTS performance on the same system.

With the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) is now officially included with its custom-built Linux kernel. We initially benchmarked WSL2 last summer (on top of our many WSL benchmarks over the years) but since then many improvements have gone into it for the May 2020 Update.

For this round of testing, the Intel Core i9 10900K (Comet Lake) CPU was used with 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200 memory, Samsung 970 EVO 250GB NVMe SSD, Gigabyte Z490 AORUS MASTER, and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics.

Windows 10 May 2020 Update was cleanly installed on this system followed by testing Ubuntu 20.04 via the original WSL and then WSL2 with all of the default settings/configurations. A clean install of Ubuntu 20.04 was then carried out on this system for looking at the raw performance of Ubuntu running bare metal on this hardware outside of Windows.

Via the Phoronix Test Suite dozens of different benchmarks were carried out. For those wondering about the GPU graphics/compute experimental support coming to WSL2, benchmarks of that will be coming soon on Phoronix for looking at the overhead on that front.