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WSL1 mapped Linux file API calls directly to NTFS file API calls.

Unfortunately this was cripplingly slow for use in e.g. Git, so they moved to a model which is more of a VM.

Yeah, WSL1 was a great idea but there were so many edge cases. e.g. allocating a gig of memory you’re not actually using is fast in Linux, not so on Windows.

Is this why Cygwin is such a dog at disk access? It seems like anytime a Cygwin binary needs to open a file it suffers from 100ms of stall.

Pretty much. AFAIK you're waiting for Windows Defender and other hooks to run.

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