However, unlike guests, the host OS is special in that it has direct access to all the hardware, which means that applications with special hardware requirements can still run without issues in the host OS.

This is because with virtualization enabled, the host OS also runs on top of the Hyper-V virtualization layer, just as guest operating systems do.

In addition, if you have Hyper-V enabled, those latency-sensitive, high-precision applications may also have issues running in the host. Also, applications relying on sub-10ms timers such as live music mixing applications or high precision times could have issues running in a virtual machine. For example, games or applications that require processing with GPUs might not work well. Programs that depend on specific hardware will not work well in a virtual machine. Because although on-demand allocation is enabled, the Linux kernel never returns the memory it has acquired to the Hyper-V host or Windows. In fact, WSL2 has the same drawback as running a Linux guest on Hyper-V, which is that the available memory of the Windows system runs out after running a large amount of load in Linux for a while. However, performance loss does exist and you have already discovered it. But unlike other guest systems, all hardware devices on your computer are passthrough to this guest system so there is not much performance penalty.

The Linux kernel of WSL2 runs on Hyper-V (although the feature name you enabled does not contain Hyper-V, but it is actually the same thing).Įnabling Hyper-V will make the Windows system itself virtualized and become the guest operating system for the Hyper-V host.

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