Windows 11 WSL2 Performance Is Quite Competitive Against Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Ubuntu 21.10

Recently I carried out some updated Windows 11 benchmarks against Linux to look at how this forthcoming Microsoft operating system release is competing with Ubuntu. In this article is a fresh look at the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) performance on the near-final Windows 11 against Ubuntu Linux.

Once Windows 11 officially ships in October we will be around with more benchmarks of this latest Microsoft Windows operating system release against various Linux distributions. In today's article is just the latest take on the Windows 11 WSL2 performance compared to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as the current long-term stable release and the default WSL2 environment plus that of bare metal Ubuntu 21.10 for seeing how the latest Ubuntu Linux performance is looking ahead of its release next month.

All tests were carried out on an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X system using the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO motherboard with 16GB of RAM, 1TB WD_BLACK SN850 NVMe SSD, and GeForce RTX 3090 graphics. In this round of WSL2 testing just the CPU and system benchmarks are being evaluated with WSL graphics / GPU compute performance being re-visited once the driver support has further stabilized.

Windows 11 22454.1000 was the latest Insider Preview at the time of testing and running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on WSL2 in its default configuration. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 21.10 daily were then carried out with clean installs for seeing how that bare metal performance is on this AMD Ryzen 5000 series desktop.