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Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

theregister.com

201–210 of 236 posts

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#201
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, not the same but you have Office 365 that does a reasonable job for most documents out there. On the other hand, not having Office is kind of a feature, it makes you learn better tools :)

> On the other hand, not having Office is kind of a feature, it makes you learn better tools :) I think this kind of attitude is why Linux on the desktop will probably never be mainstream.

> why Linux on the desktop will probably never be mainstream.

It does not need to be mainstream to be useful.

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Everyone should be afraid Please don't FUD like this. Proprietary systems on top of Linux are nothing new and Microsoft certainly isn't the first company to have done it. If you have some real proof of their business plans then let's hear that rather than encouraging speculation and fearmongering.

I had to look up what FUD was (it stands for Fear Uncertainty Doubt for anyone else who didn't know) I feel like taking an extremely cautious stance in regards to Microsoft is very fair, given that they were actually hauled in front of Congress for bad practices multiple times in the past...

> I feel like taking an extremely cautious stance in regards to Microsoft is very fair

As someone who wrote their first code for Linux in 1998 (a research project, not upstreamed), the whole "Microsoft loves Linux" thing is almost exactly like "Magneto loves the X-Men". I mean, I'm glad they're not calling us a cancer anymore, but I don't believe for a second they're a fundamentally different company; and I don't trust them one bit.

But the great thing about open-source is that bitter enemies can collaborate when it makes sense to do so.

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#203
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, not the same but you have Office 365 that does a reasonable job for most documents out there. On the other hand, not having Office is kind of a feature, it makes you learn better tools :)

What are the better tools?

Command line tools, or Python/R for anything that requires large data processing and repeatable workflows.

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#204
My reading is this allows HyperV Server (standalone, free) to be Linux based.

But I could me misunderstanding this as the ability to run HyperV on Linux baremetal much like Windows 10 with HyperV installed or Windows Server with HyperV role.

As a Windows guy, I can appreciate this. HyperV Server is already free, though requires some care and feeding if set up off a domain.

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#205
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excel is, in and of itself, a single reason alone for many people in various industries to own or operate a computer. If computers no longer ran Excel, they would buy a dedicated Excel Machine to do it, and put it on their desk next to their computer. You can make a similar argument about Premiere and After Effects, although the fact that Resolve runs on Linux is helping the situation a little. The Autodesk products…

>> Excel is, in and of itself, a single reason alone for many people in various industries to own or operate a computer. I had a client that suffered an excel/windows ransomware attack. It started with a macro or something in an excel document that, for some reason, everybody seemed to open. My inbox was flooded with "do no open anything" emails. Then the CEO called me to check on the data I had stored on my systems.…

Hopefully they also had a reasonable (and known working!) backup regime in place beforehand. ;)

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#206
post #170
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, according to TFA, the patches were submitted as an RFC. Short version: it's not in Linux, this is basically the very first step in getting it into Linux, it's still gonna be probably several months at least before it makes it into the mainline kernel, and then however long after that for it to make it into your distro's kernel. FWIW, I think it was a little over 3 years from the first "RFC" for Wireguard until…

unrelated: what does TFA mean? someone else used it in another comment

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=TFA

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently had an issue with my Linux Mint desktop where a power outage somehow introduced a hard disk error that was not easy to resolve (unless one knows exactly what to look for in the logs and knows the correct `fsck` incantation from memory). Linux is definitely still worth it, but the "just works" factor is just significantly less than MacOS.

If that had happened to you on Windows instead of doing an fsck you might have had to re-install from scratch. And I've had OS/X helpfully suggest to 'initialize a harddrive' with some perfectly good data and a borked boot block on it. Fixing that took a lot more magic than just an fsck, no matter what the incantations. Once you have trouble at that level any OS will be tricky to get going again because a lot of the…

> If that had happened to you on Windows instead of doing an fsck you might have had to re-install from scratch.

Ha, yeah, that's true. I've had better luck with MacOS. I did have a total drive failure once, but the hardware had gone bad.

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#208
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This sounds promising, something closer to OSX would give apple competition for devs like myself that want a linux based system and a fluffy "it-just-works" gui No, don't. That seems to be what they want. It's not about running linux apps on Windows. It's about blending the two so that even Linux apps are dependent on Microsft APIs and such. What is the point of bringing native DX12 to linux if not that? BTW they…

> What is the point of bringing native DX12 to linux if not that? Oh, easy: it’s so games written for DX12 on Windows—that are currently run on Linux using Wine—can have a direct, low-overhead GPU driver path, rather than Wine needing to translate DX12 calls into OpenGL/Vulkan calls first. Of course, if you’re a game-engine developer, you know you can achieve the same by just writing your engine to target Vulkan inst…

You dont make games multi-platform by bringing an API from a closed platform to an open one. You do it either by writing to multiple APIs (extra work) or by using an API that is already multi-platform.

Microsoft proprietary APIs are not and can not be part of a free software platform, that is a contradiction. They can be part of a new MS-Linux platform masquerading as the real thing until support for the real thing dries up.

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#209
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is the point of bringing native DX12 to linux if not that? Oh, easy: it’s so games written for DX12 on Windows—that are currently run on Linux using Wine—can have a direct, low-overhead GPU driver path, rather than Wine needing to translate DX12 calls into OpenGL/Vulkan calls first. Of course, if you’re a game-engine developer, you know you can achieve the same by just writing your engine to target Vulkan inst…

You dont make games multi-platform by bringing an API from a closed platform to an open one. You do it either by writing to multiple APIs (extra work) or by using an API that is already multi-platform. Microsoft proprietary APIs are not and can not be part of a free software platform, that is a contradiction. They can be part of a new MS-Linux platform masquerading as the real thing until support for the real thing d…

The "you" here is nebulous. Games are made by a studio, but are often ported by that studio's publisher, who will often then subcontract the porting work to some other development house.

(Why? Because the original studio is busy making other new games. Or because the publisher got the game produced as a one-off work-for-hire, so the original studio has no ongoing contractual relationship for the publisher to lean on. Or, sometimes, because the studio is defunct, but customers are still interested in getting new ports of the game, so "you gotta do what you gotta do.")

Publishers can't change what engine a game is written in; and there's certainly no positive ROI in a ground-up rewrite. They just have to cope with the game's codebase as-is, relying on combining small tweaks with techniques like emulation/virtualization to get the port shipped. Pushing to get the target platform to natively support the APIs the game uses, is just another such strategy.

> Microsoft proprietary APIs

What is a "proprietary API"? APIs aren't IP. Even in Oracle vs. Google, the copyright case had to focus on plagiarism of header files, not of the API.

The moment there's more than one (popular) implementation of an API, its original creator loses de-facto control over it. Third parties interested in using that API will almost always focus on the lowest-common denominator subset of the API supported by both implementations.

Which is to say that, if anything, Linux implementing DX12 would be bad for Microsoft's control over DX12, since it means that Linux could "hold DX12 features hostage" by refusing to implement them. Just like Chrome and/or Safari are currently holding a lot of HTML5 features hostage from appearing in most web-apps, by being a hold-out on implementing them.

Re: Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches to enable complete Hyper-V on Linux

#210
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, not the same but you have Office 365 that does a reasonable job for most documents out there. On the other hand, not having Office is kind of a feature, it makes you learn better tools :)

> On the other hand, not having Office is kind of a feature, it makes you learn better tools :) I think this kind of attitude is why Linux on the desktop will probably never be mainstream.

What kind of attitude do you think would make Linux on desktop mainstream?
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