Benchmarking Ubuntu 18.04 On Windows Subsystem for Linux: WSL Leading Bare Linux In More Tests

Canonical and Microsoft have rolled out Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to the Microsoft Store for running with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Here are some initial benchmarks of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on Windows 10 WSL with the April 2018 Update compared to the Bionic Beaver installed bare-metal and then also the older Ubuntu 16.04 WSL setup.

This also happens to be our first time benchmarking the recently-released Windows 10 April 2018 Update. We will have more benchmarks of this latest Windows 10 version on Phoronix soon, including bare-metal Windows 10 performance figures against a range of Linux distributions as well as more WSL tests with the growing number of Linux distributions being offered from the Microsoft Store. But for this initial testing is just centered on the Ubuntu 18.04 performance under WSL.

On the same system, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was installed and benchmarked and then doing a clean install of the Windows 10 April 2018 Update with all available system updates. From there it was off to the races in benchmarking the Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 installations with WSL.

The hardware used throughout testing included the Intel Core i9 7980XE at stock speeds (the clock differences in the system table come down to how it was exposed via sysfs on WSL), ASUS PRIME X299-A motherboard, 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory, and a 256GB Intel 760p SSDPEKKW256G8. With the Linux kernel itself not actually running with WSL, the Ubuntu 18.04 impact with WSL will likely come down to the upgraded compiler toolchain and other upgraded user-space packages of 18.04 compared to 16.04 LTS.

These Windows/Linux benchmarks were facilitated in a fully-automated and reproducible manner using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software. Stay tuned for more Windows 10 April 2018 Update versus Linux benchmarks coming up soon on Phoronix.