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DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#101

Post by kelnos »

modeless wrote: post #26
wmf wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

someone could implement it natively in Linux This is exactly what we don't want. There's already plenty of effort wasted on GBM vs. EGLStream so introducing a third API would just lower quality even more.

This "third API" is already well supported by every relevant graphics vendor. Adopting it would actually reduce the number of APIs vendors need to deal with. And the quality of WDDM drivers has always been higher than anything Linux has.

Great, just what I want, vendors to be incentivized to force me to run closed binary blobs on my Linux box because they'll just repackage their Windows driver and still not release its source.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#102

Post by improv32 »

_vbdg wrote: post #2

> This also enables third party APIs, such as the popular NVIDIA Cuda compute API, to be hardware accelerated within a WSL environment. Dollars to donuts this is why Microsoft is implementing this. GPU acceleration is becoming a critical feature for many users (but especially developers) and this will continue. If WSL is to be a serious competitor, this is necessary and I'm glad to see it showing up. This is true of…

> AF_PACKET

Just run a Linux hyper-v vm. That's what WSL2 is doing under the hood anyway. I run it this way and it's great. I have windows terminal auto ssh into it. Performance is great. And using the X server x410 on the windows side gui performance is fantastic (though no hardware acceleration) because instead of ssh tunneling x410 suports AF_VSOCK for the x socket, which hyper-v supports for performance as good as a domain socket on the same machine.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#103

Post by kelnos »

rrss wrote: post #37
stefan_ wrote: post #15

This is the kind of driver that you get when you ignore all existing Linux code, then try to throw 15k LOC over the wall when its all done. Microsoft should really know better: this is not how you get your code upstreamed .

I doubt Microsoft really cares. Microsoft will ship it in the linux kernel in WSL2, and people will use it, and if the upstream community doesn't want it I don't see why Microsoft would have a problem with that.

They'd certainly prefer that upstream Linux maintains it for them. The more code they have to maintain out of tree, the harder it is for them to upgrade their WSL kernel.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#104

Post by ndesaulniers »

noderat wrote: post #65
christoph-heiss wrote: post #3

FYI: This is the first draft of the Microsoft Virtual GPU (vGPU) driver. The driver exposes a paravirtualized GPU to user mode applications running in a virtual machine on a Windows host. This enables hardware acceleration in environment such as WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) where the Linux virtual machine is able to share the GPU with the Windows host. So this isn't actual "DirectX on Linux", just a driver for a…

No, if you read the blog post on Microsoft's site it goes into more detail: This is the real and full D3D12 API, no imitations, pretender or reimplementation here… this is the real deal. libd3d12.so is compiled from the same source code as d3d12.dll on Windows but for a Linux target. It offers the same level of functionality and performance (minus virtualization overhead).

It says 4 sentences earlier:

>> Linux when running in WSL.

>> minus virtualization overhead

refers to "para" in "paravirtualization." "Paravirtualization" is reducing the overhead of virtualization when the guest knows it's being virtualized.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#105

Post by kelnos »

monocasa wrote: post #57
4cao wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. In the meantime I also noticed the following comment from Dave Airlie on LKML [1]: > This is a driver that connects a binary blob interface in the Windows kernel drivers to a binary blob that you run inside a Linux guest. It's a binary transport between two binary pieces. [...] I can see why it might be nice to have this upstream, but I don't forsee any other Linux distributor ever enabling it or having to…

He's pretty against it on a number of fronts. That being said I don't see why distros like Ubuntu that allow non free code wouldn't ship with it out of the box. They already support Nvidia binary drivers anyway, so why wouldn't they support a transport bridge that'd let people use them on WSL too? Also, he notices that it's intended to be more than a bridge in the future, as they're already working on integrating it…

Why would they? In its current state, this driver is only useful when Linux is running on Windows. A regular Linux desktop/server user would not find this useful.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#106

Post by agildehaus »

sandworm101 wrote: post #82
pier25 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This will eventually be a full graphics stack Are we seeing the start of the migration of Windows to linux?

>> the migration of Windows to linux Please no. Please keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate. Call me a purist, but linux should take nothing from windows, give no ground, make no compromise. One must die for the other to live. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

Chocolate and peanut butter are pretty good together. Just sayin'.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#107

Post by fouc »

Rusky wrote: post #86
ghostpepper wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the intent matter if the result is the same?

Will the result be the same? I don't see why it would be, given the circumstances.

If their boss comes to them with a mandate later, their intentions will be forced to change. Also, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#108

Post by Phylter »

_vbdg wrote: post #2

> This also enables third party APIs, such as the popular NVIDIA Cuda compute API, to be hardware accelerated within a WSL environment. Dollars to donuts this is why Microsoft is implementing this. GPU acceleration is becoming a critical feature for many users (but especially developers) and this will continue. If WSL is to be a serious competitor, this is necessary and I'm glad to see it showing up. This is true of…

"There is currently no presentation integration with WSL as WSL is a console only experience today. The D3D12 API can be used for offscreen rendering and compute, but there is no swapchain support to copy pixels directly to the screen (yet )."

This leads me to believe that display support is intended in the future. It's a work in progress. They've gone this far why would they stop at compute? Still, it's pretty awesome if you ask me.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#109

Post by castis »

_vbdg wrote: post #2

> This also enables third party APIs, such as the popular NVIDIA Cuda compute API, to be hardware accelerated within a WSL environment. Dollars to donuts this is why Microsoft is implementing this. GPU acceleration is becoming a critical feature for many users (but especially developers) and this will continue. If WSL is to be a serious competitor, this is necessary and I'm glad to see it showing up. This is true of…

> The Linux gaming folks will be pretty sad about this one.

I was a tad bummed when realizing what this actually was, but still very much impressed.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#110

Post by monocasa »

kelnos wrote: post #105
monocasa wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's pretty against it on a number of fronts. That being said I don't see why distros like Ubuntu that allow non free code wouldn't ship with it out of the box. They already support Nvidia binary drivers anyway, so why wouldn't they support a transport bridge that'd let people use them on WSL too? Also, he notices that it's intended to be more than a bridge in the future, as they're already working on integrating it…

Why would they? In its current state, this driver is only useful when Linux is running on Windows. A regular Linux desktop/server user would not find this useful.

Azure is more than 50% Linux. There's an incredible amount of "regular" Linux instances running on top of hyper-v. This lets them use a virtualized GPU in that env.

On top of that, why would canonical care what hypervisor you're running? There's so many other cases where they haven't gone "eww.. proprietary", why would they start now.

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