Ubuntu 20.04 vs. Windows 10 WSL/WSL2 Performance In 170+ Benchmarks

One of the main hurdles with the original Windows Subsystem for Linux was the slow I/O performance since overcome with WSL2. Indeed, on this Ryzen Threadripper HEDT system when running the common SQLite embedded database library the WSL2 performance is now matching that of bare metal Ubuntu.

One of the few cases seeing a significant performance hit with WSL2 compared to WSL was the C-Blosc compressor.

In a few other cases like HPCG and some of the heavy OpenMP benchmarks, WSL2 was also slower than WSL. This appears to be due to the more VM-like approach employed by WSL2.

But for many workloads on this latest stable Windows 10 update, WSL2 is offering nearly the same performance as bare metal Ubuntu 20.04.