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CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

devblogs.nvidia.com

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Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#61

Post by deno »

anaisbetts wrote: post #53
deno wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VSCode works just fine with hidpi on Linux. It’s just an Electron app after all, and Chromium has had hidpi support since forever.

Many many many apps on Linux still have massive issues with DPI, especially with mixed-DPI environments (which are no longer an edge case, they're the Common Case with a laptop attached to a monitor). Even accessing machines remotely via Xrdp has huge issues because once you create the session with a certain DPI, logging into the session from a different DPI machine means you're stuck reading either extremely tiny or…

Using mixed-blurriness environment sounds like a nightmare to me, even if everything should work correctly.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#63

Post by Stevvo »

anonymousDan wrote: post #12
benbristow wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does kind of feel that way. Having a full Windows Desktop with good graphics drivers and software like Microsoft Office, Photoshop, commercial games etc. and Linux for the programming/server-software side of things. I have literally no reason to dual-boot with Ubuntu anymore. WSL2 and Visual Studio Code fulfils all my Linux coding requirements. Maybe (probably?) a bad thing but it's damn convenient.

Yeah I just started using Windows 10/WSL yesterday and I have to say I'm impressed. Are there any downsides/painpoints I should be aware of?

In WSL 1.0, you would run into show stopping bugs or incompatibilities eventually. I haven't had any problems in 2.0

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#64

Post by shmerl »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #35
shmerl wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next step, Nvidia will support only WSL and not normal Linux? Good riddance, we need less blobs.

Actually, this might be a great price discriminator for NVidia. They have tried to differentiate their consumer and professional GPUs so they can charge different prices. I could see NVidia only providing WSL/Windows drivers for their consumer GPUs. If you want native Linux, then you would have to buy a professional GPU at higher cost. By great, I mean great for NVidia, not for us.

I'd say it's going to be great for Linux, since usage of Nvidia will drop and progress will accelerate, because no one will have to deal with blob idiosyncrasies caused by Nvidia refusing to upstream their driver.

With Intel joining AMD on high end GPU scene with open drivers, it's Nvidia who will be the loser with their dinosaur blob approach.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#65

Post by patrec »

jacquesm wrote: post #10

Pity. CUDA was/is proof positive that Linux on the desktop is perfectly feasible and that you can use it to both do a UI and do meaningful computation on the same machine without getting tied down into all kinds of licensing schemes. Opening this further up to Windows gives fewer people a really good reason to try out Linux as their daily driver. I personally don't get why any developer would prefer Windows over Linu…

> I personally don't get why any developer would prefer Windows over Linux

Because windows now literally has all the stuff Linux has plus a lot more.

The only reason for a well paid developer to prefer linux over windows for a desktop OS is that you don't need any of the extra stuff (a decent desktop experience, hardware support and a commercial end user software eco system) or that you have some fundamental objections concerning Microsoft's business practices. These are good reasons, but experience shows that most people don't care enough about things like privacy to give up convenience or shiny things.

Apple may be in for a tough awakening. They profited enormously from providing the desktop OS that a very large fraction of the technical elite has been using for a long time. MacOS still is still smoother than windows in some regards, but the writing is on the wall: linux completely dominates the server but is as hopeless as ever as a general purpose desktop OS, but windows no longer sucks for software development. It used to be that macs had the unique selling point of offering a nice desktop experience on good hardware coupled with something close enough to linux that you could use it for a very wide range of software development tasks. But new hardware is developer hostile and macOS drifts further and further away from linux (ever more lock-down that directly breaks developer workflows and tooling and ever more diverging user land with a mix of ancient GNU and irrelevant BSD tooling). By contrast windows now includes an ultra-high-fidelity linux layer with excellent tooling and integration to "core" windows and Microsoft also owns the world's most popular editor and code hosting solution.

I'm amazed how well Microsoft has managed to find back to its embrace, extend, extinguish roots. It is both a technical and a strategic marvel.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#67

Post by usrusr »

jacquesm wrote: post #10

Pity. CUDA was/is proof positive that Linux on the desktop is perfectly feasible and that you can use it to both do a UI and do meaningful computation on the same machine without getting tied down into all kinds of licensing schemes. Opening this further up to Windows gives fewer people a really good reason to try out Linux as their daily driver. I personally don't get why any developer would prefer Windows over Linu…

You call it opening up to Windows, I call it the final word on the question of a proper Windows port. Once WSL is established as the one way to use a piece of software on Windows it stay in the half-world of WSL forever.

Perhaps WSL is a perfect tie in terms of user migration: for every person who decides that WSL is their most convenient way of using Linux there might be another who decides that if they are spending so much time in WSL anyways should better try shipping the surrounding Windows. And everybody wins, even pure Linux users who will over time use more software that isn't developed with the overhead of Windows port ifdefs.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#68

Post by dman »

patrec wrote: post #65
jacquesm wrote: post #10

Pity. CUDA was/is proof positive that Linux on the desktop is perfectly feasible and that you can use it to both do a UI and do meaningful computation on the same machine without getting tied down into all kinds of licensing schemes. Opening this further up to Windows gives fewer people a really good reason to try out Linux as their daily driver. I personally don't get why any developer would prefer Windows over Linu…

> I personally don't get why any developer would prefer Windows over Linux Because windows now literally has all the stuff Linux has plus a lot more. The only reason for a well paid developer to prefer linux over windows for a desktop OS is that you don't need any of the extra stuff (a decent desktop experience, hardware support and a commercial end user software eco system) or that you have some fundamental objectio…

I hope they stop at extend this time.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#69

Post by mook »

cbhl wrote: post #33

Previous discussion from when Microsoft sent patches to Linux upstream to enable this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23241040 And related discussion on lkml with more context: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/19/1139

As usual, LWN has a great article on it that is much more approachable than raw LKML:

https://lwn.net/Articles/821817/

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#70

Post by xiphias2 »

shmerl wrote: post #64
RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, this might be a great price discriminator for NVidia. They have tried to differentiate their consumer and professional GPUs so they can charge different prices. I could see NVidia only providing WSL/Windows drivers for their consumer GPUs. If you want native Linux, then you would have to buy a professional GPU at higher cost. By great, I mean great for NVidia, not for us.

I'd say it's going to be great for Linux, since usage of Nvidia will drop and progress will accelerate, because no one will have to deal with blob idiosyncrasies caused by Nvidia refusing to upstream their driver. With Intel joining AMD on high end GPU scene with open drivers, it's Nvidia who will be the loser with their dinosaur blob approach.

As games are running both on AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, but CUDA is NVIDIA only (and supported by lots of languages and libraries), as a programmer I don't see how AMD could disrupt NVIDIA's developer friendliness/lock in (unless AMD provides a great CUDA implementation).
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