Does Enabling WSL2 Affect Performance of Windows 10 Applications

WSL2 offers improved performance over version 1 by providing more direct access to the host hardware drivers. Recent “Insider Dev Channel” builds of Win10 even allows access to the Windows NVIDIA display driver for GPU computing applications for WSL2 Linux applications! The performance improvements with WSL2 are largely because this version is running as a privileged virtual machine on to of MS Hyper-V. This means that at least low level support for the Hyper-V virtualization layer needs to be enabled to use it. In particular, the Windows feature “VirtualMachinePlatform” must be enabled for WSL2. We tested to see if there was any negative application performance impact.