https://tonym.us/tag/virtualization.html Recent content in Virtualization on Tony Metzidis Hugo en-us Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:20:00 -0700 https://tonym.us/wsl3-kernel-mitigations-tax-benchmark.html Tue, 06 Oct 2026 16:20:00 -0700 https://tonym.us/wsl3-kernel-mitigations-tax-benchmark.html <p>In our earlier look at <a href="https://tonym.us/wsl2-security-tax-reclaiming-performance.html">The Security Tax in WSL 2</a>, we showed how kernel-level mitigations for CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities (Spectre, Meltdown, Retbleed) imposed a steep penalty on developer tasks. On a real-world Go backend compilation workload, turning off mitigations slashed kernel system time by <strong>45.7%</strong> and delivered a <strong>31.7% drop in wall-clock compile time</strong>.</p> <p>With the rollout of <strong>WSL v3.0.2</strong> (running Linux kernel <code>6.18.40.1-microsoft-standard-WSL2</code>), how does the security tax hold up today? Does modern hypervisor paravirtualization eliminate the overhead, or are developers still paying an invisible performance toll on syscall-heavy workloads?</p>