Windows 10 WSL: Ubuntu vs. openSUSE Leap Performance

First up was the SQLite benchmark. As usual, the I/O performance of Windows WSL is much lower than running Linux "bare metal" with the file-system having direct-access to the disk. Under Windows 10, WSL has to maintain the Linux file meta-data as well as the NTFS meta-data. Microsoft has said they are working on improving I/O, but how far they will get in optimizing it remains to be seen. I/O remains the slowest area for WSL.

With raw memory performance measured by Stream, the Windows 10 WSL results are right on par with the native Linux installations for both Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and openSUSE Leap 42.2.

Himeno is one of the workloads where it's CPU bound but Windows 10 WSL is much slower than the native Linux installations. Himeno is AVX-heavy and it's possible under WSL that AVX is not working correctly or the like as a possible reason for the difference.

The timed kernel compilation performance is much slower on Windows 10 WSL due to the I/O bottleneck.