An Early Look At Windows 11 WSL2 Performance Against Ubuntu Linux

For those making use of Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for enjoying Linux application support within Windows, here are some early benchmarks of the inaugural Windows Insider Preview build of Windows 11 with WSL2 against Windows 10 and then Ubuntu Linux bare metal on the same hardware.

While there is several months to go until the RTM build of Windows 11, last week's Windows Insider Preview build of Windows 11 (22000.51 build) led to the desire and curiosity to run some initial Windows 11 benchmarks against Linux and now for investigating how the WSL2 performance is looking on this next major Windows release.

Windows 10 H121 with all stable updates was tested with WSL2 and then again using Windows 11 22000.51. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was used for testing both Windows releases with WSL2. Following that Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS was tested bare metal for looking at the "raw" Linux performance on the same hardware and then again with Ubuntu 21.04 as the latest stable (non-LTS) release.

The same system was used for all of the testing and based around the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X with 2 x 16GB DDR4-3600 memory and WD_BLACK SN750 NVMe solid-state storage. All of the same BIOS settings and OS defaults were maintained throughout this WSL2-focused Ubuntu benchmarking. Obviously once Windows 11 has been officially released I will be back around with some new benchmarks of how the official build is performing.