(20H2) with 87% of the performance of native Ubuntu 20.04.0 LTS. This is an improvement over WSL 1, which has only 70% of the performance of native Ubuntu in this comparison. WSL 2 improves I/O performance, providing a near-native level. A comparison of 69 tests with Intel i9 10900K in May 2020 shows nearly the same relative performance. In December 2020, a benchmark with 43 tests with an AMD Ryzen 5900X shows good performance with WSL 2 (20H2) with 93% of the performance of native 20.04.1 LTS. This is an improvement over WSL 1, which has only 73% in this comparison. WSL 2 Version 2 introduces changes in the architecture. Microsoft has opted for virtualization through a highly optimized subset of Hyper-V features, in order to run the kernel and distributions (based upon the kernel), promising performance equivalent to WSL 1. For backward compatibility, developers don't need to change anything in their published distributions. WSL 2 settings can be tweaked by the WSL global configuration, contained in an INI file named .wslconfig in the User Profile folder. The distribution installation resides inside an ext4-formatted filesystem inside a virtual disk, and the host file system is transparently accessible through the 9P protocol, similarly to other virtual machine technologies like QEMU. For the users, Microsoft promised up to 20 times the read/write performance of WSL 1. From Windows an IFS network redirector is provided for Linux guest file access using the UNC path prefix of \\wsl$. WSL 2 requires Windows 11, or Windows 10 version 1903 or higher, with Build 18362 or higher, for x64 systems, and Version 2004 or higher, with Build 19041 or higher, for ARM64 systems. WSL 2 and Windows 11 are in good shape with 95% performance of native Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. See also Azure Sphere Windows Terminal Xenix References Further reading External links WSL on Microsoft Learn Compatibility layers Virtualization software Windows 10 Windows components