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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

#71

Post by epmaybe »

anaisbetts wrote: post #21

Having set this up, this is going to be absolutely huge for ML. A lot of nonsense is getting cut down by this: 1. You don't have to install special CUDA-specific drivers that are behind the normal gaming drivers anymore. You'll soon be able to just use the Regular nVidia Drivers (and even now, all you need to do is install a Beta driver version). That's huge for someone just starting out, they don't have to have "the…

> for someone just starting out

I'd hope that the barrier to entry for starting ML practitioners isn't easy environment setup, as Google cloud, AWS, even colab exist with easy to use environments.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#72

Post by g_airborne »

This looks very cool if it can deliver up to its promises! As a Mac user and ML developer I’m starting to look more and more jealous towards Windows - it is starting to make sense this way.

But I’m also a bit afraid. Has anything related to CUDA ever been easy to install and setup? Anyone who tried this have some pointers on this? For example, I don’t know how many times I’ve googled the CUDA, cudnn, TF compatibility matrix but it must be close to 100. Is this helping fix that as well?

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#73

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

alerighi wrote: post #43
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, CUDA is about the opposite of open source. It needs special hardware and a closed source driver. CUDA on Windows was already a big deal in engineering. Scientists and academics preferred Linux (and python, and docker) and Windows is playing catch up there to become compatible with the tools that have grown in popularity over the last 5 years. Personally, as an open source advocate, I think competition (even fro…

Also Linux is becoming the new Windows, and is one of the reason I stopped using it. What is the point of using a system that on every release is more and more bloated and full of crap that it breaks? Docker for example, I hate it, it serves no purpose beside wasting disk space and slowing down your machine. BTRFS is a bugged imitation of ZFS. Wayland not only is bugged but even does less things than Xorg. Most scien…

I do agree that Linux has been adding complexity at a good pace the last 10 years.

I disagree about Docker. It's a good tool for reproducible development and production environments. What else should we use? virtual machines?

Scientists and academics are not in general, professional software engineers. At least they are using open source tools! What you rather they write their spaghetti in? MATLAB?

FreeBSD does not have the mindshare and ecosystem that Linux does. That actually does matter.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#74

Post by jen20 »

kyberias wrote: post #28
curiousgal wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than C# and other Microsoft specific stacks, I've found coding on Windows to be absolutely horrible compared to Linux.

Can you be more specific? What exactly is horrible on Windows when you've tried coding?

I tried Windows 10 Pro and Windows 2019 Server about 2 months ago on a self-built computer (my first in ~15 years). What I found was:

- driver support was atrocious for Windows server, and also for Windows 10. Almost every component from a fairly standard Ryzen build installed some form of custom skinned crapware to get basic functionality

- spyware and advertising was everywhere.

- the UI is a mess of old and new. It's unforgivable that this far from Windows 8 there is still such a mix of metro and older UIs.

- mixed DPI support is poor leading to screens where elements are quite different sizes

These are not specific to coding, but in particular the advertising and spyware removes Windows as a contender for _any_ use from me.

After a brief foray into desktop Linux, I returned all the parts to Microcenter and went back to OS X.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#75

Post by claudeganon »

epmaybe wrote: post #71
anaisbetts wrote: post #21

Having set this up, this is going to be absolutely huge for ML. A lot of nonsense is getting cut down by this: 1. You don't have to install special CUDA-specific drivers that are behind the normal gaming drivers anymore. You'll soon be able to just use the Regular nVidia Drivers (and even now, all you need to do is install a Beta driver version). That's huge for someone just starting out, they don't have to have "the…

> for someone just starting out I'd hope that the barrier to entry for starting ML practitioners isn't easy environment setup, as Google cloud, AWS, even colab exist with easy to use environments.

Anyone recommend a good guide for quick setup and noodling on one of these platforms? I tried a Digital Ocean machine learning droplet awhile back with one of their guides and nothing on it worked.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#76

Post by mycall »

SXX wrote: post #50
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, CUDA is about the opposite of open source. It needs special hardware and a closed source driver. CUDA on Windows was already a big deal in engineering. Scientists and academics preferred Linux (and python, and docker) and Windows is playing catch up there to become compatible with the tools that have grown in popularity over the last 5 years. Personally, as an open source advocate, I think competition (even fro…

WSL2 and all these features don't have anything to do with open source either. It's basically a shim for communication of two proprietary bits of software on both sides. Fortunately all these graphics and compute shims will never get merged into upstream kernel so they'll be second-class citizens like forever. Dave Airlie who is maintainer of Linux graphics subsystem will never allow to merge it since it's can only b…

Is this the wrong repository for what you are referring to, as this appear open source?

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#77

Post by Dylan16807 »

alerighi wrote: post #43
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, CUDA is about the opposite of open source. It needs special hardware and a closed source driver. CUDA on Windows was already a big deal in engineering. Scientists and academics preferred Linux (and python, and docker) and Windows is playing catch up there to become compatible with the tools that have grown in popularity over the last 5 years. Personally, as an open source advocate, I think competition (even fro…

Also Linux is becoming the new Windows, and is one of the reason I stopped using it. What is the point of using a system that on every release is more and more bloated and full of crap that it breaks? Docker for example, I hate it, it serves no purpose beside wasting disk space and slowing down your machine. BTRFS is a bugged imitation of ZFS. Wayland not only is bugged but even does less things than Xorg. Most scien…

> BTRFS is a bugged imitation of ZFS.

It has bugs, but at least it supports copy-on-write files and making snapshots writable.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#78

Post by modeless »

anaisbetts wrote: post #21

Having set this up, this is going to be absolutely huge for ML. A lot of nonsense is getting cut down by this: 1. You don't have to install special CUDA-specific drivers that are behind the normal gaming drivers anymore. You'll soon be able to just use the Regular nVidia Drivers (and even now, all you need to do is install a Beta driver version). That's huge for someone just starting out, they don't have to have "the…

Installing CUDA specific drivers was always optional, in case you wanted to be sure of being on a tested configuration. The runtime parts of CUDA have always been included with the gaming drivers. The CUDA install was mainly for the development SDK, nvcc, etc.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#79

Post by epmaybe »

claudeganon wrote: post #75
epmaybe wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for someone just starting out I'd hope that the barrier to entry for starting ML practitioners isn't easy environment setup, as Google cloud, AWS, even colab exist with easy to use environments.

Anyone recommend a good guide for quick setup and noodling on one of these platforms? I tried a Digital Ocean machine learning droplet awhile back with one of their guides and nothing on it worked.

I liked using colab to test certain things out, but it depends on whether or not you enjoy using tensorflow.

Edit: I should also add that if you enjoyed the colab experience but want to scale up, you can attach the same notebooks to a Google cloud compute VM and run them on that.

Re: CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

#80

Post by ylyn »

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…

> you don't need any of the extra stuff (a decent desktop experience ...)

I have a better experience on Linux now than I've had on Windows in the past.

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