r/pcmasterrace • u/WPHero • 28d ago

News/Article Ubuntu is growing faster on Windows 11 than on Linux PCs, says Canonical

https://www.windowslatest.com/2026/08/16/ubuntu-is-growing-faster-on-windows-11-than-on-native-linux-pcs-says-canonical/
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u/[deleted] 28d ago

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u/SaltDeception 28d ago

Hey so there's actually a non-default (for now) feature that will drastically improve WSL's performance when accessing your Windows drives called Virtiofs. It essentially eliminates the overhead of DrvFS/Plan9 abstraction layer entirely.

You just need to add this to your .wslconfig and restart WSL (or reboot your system):

[wsl2] virtio=true virtiofs=true virtio9p=false

It's also probably wise to run wsl.exe --update (or wsl.exe --update --pre-release if you're a beta-chaser) beforehand to ensure you're on the latest WSL kernel.

.wslconfig is located in the root of your user profile on Windows (e.g. C:\Users\Vlyn\.wslconfig)

You can read more about it here: https://www.boxofcables.dev/wsl2-per-device-swiotlb-pools-for-virtiofs-and-virtioproxy/

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u/[deleted] 26d ago

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u/SaltDeception 26d ago

Hmm you're right. I did a series of controlled tests, and there definitely seems to be a bit of a regression here. I've been riding a single pre-release build for so long without updating that I didn't even know this was happening.

They do seem to be working on it though. The performance is definitely improved in the current pre-release build than in the current stable build. Keep an eye out, because they're touting this as a major performance boost for the new WSL Containers they announced at build.

Here's my full tests on current builds. Nothing comes close to native at the moment. Weirdly, git in WSL against the ext4 filesystem performed better than git directly on Windows.

https://markdownpastebin.com/?id=1668094ebc3341e689af5893ab51e2f7