DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#11

Post by modeless » Tue, May 19, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

Mic92 wrote: post #7

_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…

Do ML people actually care about DirectX? I thought everyone is using CUDA? Anyway in my university building I have not seen anyone that does machine learning on Windows.

CUDA is supported as well.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#12

Post by woadwarrior01 » Tue, May 19, 2020, 10:50 PM UTC

Hopefully, this will enable Windows users will be able to run docker containers that use GPUs the way Linux users have been able to for years now with nvidia’s container toolkit[1].

[1]: https://github.com/NVIDIA/nvidia-docker

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#13

Post by raphlinus » Tue, May 19, 2020, 10:50 PM UTC

Mic92 wrote: post #7

_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…

Do ML people actually care about DirectX? I thought everyone is using CUDA? Anyway in my university building I have not seen anyone that does machine learning on Windows.

Yes, (almost) everybody doing machine learning is on CUDA. There are multiple pieces of this work, and the DirectX API's are only part of it. Other pieces get CUDA running as well.

And yet another piece is a layer to get OpenGL and OpenCL workloads running on DX12 as well, rather similar in scope to how MoltenVK and the gfx-hal Vulkan Portability work are a layer to get Vulkan workloads running on Metal. This is a big effort, and it seems to me their goal is to get things to the point where stuff Just Works and you don't have to think too hard about the various bits of (technically difficult!) infrastructure to get you there.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#14

Post by modeless » Tue, May 19, 2020, 10:52 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #6

...and extend. I'm sure this architecture was easier for MS but it opens the door to code that runs on WSL2 that doesn't run on regular Linux.

This patch adds WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) as a Linux kernel API. The implementation just forwards to the Windows kernel, but it seems to me like someone could implement it natively in Linux. Then Windows user mode graphics drivers would work natively in Linux without WSL, and DX12 too.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#15

Post by stefan_ » Tue, May 19, 2020, 10:56 PM UTC

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.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#16

Post by zakk » Tue, May 19, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

I remember when DirectX was a huge obstacle to porting games to Linux. This feels like a great, great victory for Linux to me!

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#17

Post by wmf » Tue, May 19, 2020, 10:57 PM UTC

modeless wrote: post #14

wmf wrote: post #6

...and extend. I'm sure this architecture was easier for MS but it opens the door to code that runs on WSL2 that doesn't run on regular Linux.

This patch adds WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) as a Linux kernel API. The implementation just forwards to the Windows kernel, but it seems to me like someone could implement it natively in Linux. Then Windows user mode graphics drivers would work natively in Linux without WSL, and DX12 too.

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.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#18

Post by swiley » Tue, May 19, 2020, 10:59 PM UTC

Maybe I'm missing something but how is this an improvement over virgl? Something that's platform agnostic and works with applications right now being replaced with something that's very tied to windows.

Not a fan but also not a graphics programmer.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#19

Post by guuguuguu » Tue, May 19, 2020, 11:00 PM UTC

jagger27 wrote: post #4

The linked blog post in TFA has a clearer title: "DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux"

true

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#20

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Tue, May 19, 2020, 11:03 PM UTC

zakk wrote: post #16

I remember when DirectX was a huge obstacle to porting games to Linux. This feels like a great, great victory for Linux to me!

You're not seeing the big picture. If Windows can do Windows apps and also 90% of what Linux developers use Linux for, what need is there ever for Linux on the desktop? MS marketing may be trumpeting their love for open source but WSL2 is a actually a brilliant bit of jujutsu[0] on Microsoft's part.

[0] I use this word specifically because it's a martial art about using an opponent's strength against themselves. MS's use of Chrome as the basis for their new browser is another example of this.