Windows 11 WSL2 Performance vs. Ubuntu Linux With The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D

When carrying out the recent Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 23.04 benchmarks with the AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Zen 4 3D V-Cache desktop processor, I also took the opportunity with the Windows 11 install around to check in on the Windows 11 WSL2 performance. Here is a fresh look at Ubuntu with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2 on Windows 11) compared to the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on the same hardware as well as the new Ubuntu 23.04.

The AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D at stock speeds with 2 x 16GB DDR5-6000 memory, ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR X670E HERO, 2TB Solidigm P44 Pro NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics were used for this fresh round of Windows Subsystem for Linux testing.

Atop an updated Windows 11 Pro installation the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS within WSL2 was first benchmarked. Following that was a clean "bare metal" install of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS running on the same hardware itself. For a third data point is a look at how Ubuntu 23.04 runs bare metal on this system compared to the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS results bare metal and within the WSL confines.

This testing is primarily focused on system and CPU benchmarks, including I/O. Prior WSl2 benchmarking with other CPUs has generally shown the processor overhead to be minimal compared to Linux bare metal performance but with I/O (disk) performance being one of the areas where there can be some slowdowns with this Microsoft Linux environment.