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Recently saw some interesting benchmarks of Early Windows 11 WSL2 Performance vs Native Ubuntu Linux vs Windows 10. Some comments about this seem to indicate a belief that Windows' ACL implementation generally has a dramatic effect on this performance.

I think it would be interesting to see these benchmarks run again with the ACL functionality turned off in Windows. Can this be done and if so, how?

If the answer is a hard "no," then the followup will be has anyone seen Windows 10 run on exFAT instead of NTFS?

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    I doubt that statement, considering that ACLs are checked at file open time, not for every write... (and the VHD is always held open while the virtual machine is running.)
    – grawity_u1686
    Commented Jul 10, 2021 at 21:29

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I haven't seen Win 10 on exFat or Fat32 (not sure if you can do it), but I have tried both filesystems as C: drive with Windows 8 a long time ago.

I was just playing around with Win 8 at the time and tried it to see if it was possible at all. Had to do some funky things. Needed to make and format the partition first, copy the content of the Windows installation files to a folder on that partition and then run the actual setup from there to prevent Windows from re-formatting the partition as NTFS. (Can't remember the exact steps. It was 8 years ago.)

Windows 8 wasn't noticeably any faster on exFat than on NTFS. Fat32 was noticeably SLOWER however. (I presume the Fat32 filesystem drivers are really legacy and have not been much optimized over the years.)

Since there is very little difference in the exFat filesystem and ACL handling between Windows 8 and Windows 10 I am fairly certain it wouldn't be noticeable in Windows 10 either.

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  • Very interesting. Might be worth a shot to try again with the battery of benchmarks to see if anything at all is detectable.
    – ylluminate
    Commented Jul 10, 2021 at 22:04
  • Windows Vista and up requires NTFS because it needs symlinks and hardlinks to work, so how can you install Windows 8 on FAT32?
    – phuclv
    Commented Jul 11, 2021 at 4:01
  • @phuclv Fat32 has symbolic links. Just no hardlinks, but Windows doesn't use those for the OS.
    – Tonny
    Commented Jul 12, 2021 at 11:53
  • @Tonny no, FAT32 definitely doesn't support symlinks. And Windows Vista+ uses symlink in the WinSxS folder a lot, and may be in other folders as well. It can't work without that feature
    – phuclv
    Commented Jul 12, 2021 at 13:00
  • @phuclv You're right and I'm confused. My bad: I got confused because I have used Linux softlinks (ln -s) in the past on Fat32 and exFat filesystems, but those are another kind of links. Not a symbolic link in the Windows sense. However I was able to install and run Win 8 that way. For all I know that Windows installation was seriously borked because of this, but I didn't use it long/seriously enough to run into any issues.
    – Tonny
    Commented Jul 12, 2021 at 13:43

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