It’s been a while since delivering any benchmarks on Phoronix of Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) for running Linux applications and other software under the confines of Windows 11. When recently carrying out the Windows 11 25H2 vs. Linux benchmarks I also took the opportunity for seeing how WSL is performing on that leading-edge Windows release compared to running a bare metal Ubuntu Linux installation.
This round of testing is looking at the performance of Ubuntu 24.04 WSL2 under Windows 11 Pro 25H2 versus running Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS bare metal on the same hardware. In effect, the current performance overhead/costs of using Windows Subsystem for Linux under Windows 11 rather than just booting to Ubuntu Linux directly.
The same system was used for the testing:
The hardware used for all of this testing was the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D with 32GB of RAM and 1TB PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD (Crucial T705), and other hardware. Both operating systems and WSL were all at their defaults for testing in comparing the out-of-the-box performance difference for Ubuntu WSL2 versus Ubuntu LTS running unrestricted on the system “bare metal” without needing to leverage Windows 11.
