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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

#171

Post by rezonant »

ldng wrote: post #164
kelnos wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you read the replies by Dave Airlie and Daniel Vetter, it seems somewhat likely that upstream won't accept it. Perhaps that's just initial skepticism that will evaporate after more discussion, but perhaps not. Frankly this does just seem like MS wanting to reduce their maintenance burden on what they expect will be a very important part of their WSL offering on Windows. There's nothing inherently wrong with that d…

> [0] Airlie is even concerned that just by looking at the code, he or other DRI developers could run into future IP derived-works trouble when designing future Linux graphics interfaces. And that is, IMHO, a very real concern and it really should not be merged.

Yeah, I think MS should address this point. Airlie also asked if everything here is covered by Open Invention Network (OIN) of which Microsoft is a participant, and indeed I'm pretty sure it all has to be since that is the point of OIN. But the MS devs will now need to have legal sign off that it's all covered by OIN before they can respond in the affirmative. I assume that will take some time as these things usually do. Especially since this seems more like a bottom-up effort than something top-down managed

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#172

Post by bitcrazed »

hetspookjee wrote: post #168
lostmsu wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest I don't quite understand what stopped those developers from running machine learning on their GPUs under Windows itself. Most frameworks work just fine. I've been doing quite a lot of TensorFlow with both Python and .NET. The only time I faced the need for Linux box is trying a demo project from OpenAI, which did not use the features it required Linux for on a single machine anyway.

My experience with GPU accelerated development is quite horrible on Windows for anything other than the NVIDIA prepped docker container. There was always something missing or some drover was incompatible. In the long run I have always regretted developping Python on Windows, also often because whatever was developped was to be deployed on a Linux box. I do not think it's purely windows to blame here though. It's only…

Hi. PM on Windows & WSL here.

Imagine if you could run AI/ML apps and tools that are coded to take advantage of DirectML on Windows and/or atop DirectML via WSL.

Now you can run the tools you want and need in whichever environment you like ... on any (capable) GPU you like: You don't have to buy a particular vendor's GPU to run your code.

If you're old like me and remember the dark ol' days when games shipped with specific drivers for (early) GPU cards/chips, but failed to run at all if you didn't have one of the supported cards, you'll understand why this is a big deal.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#173

Post by rezonant »

detaro wrote: post #92
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a possibility Linux upstream won't accept it?

That's pretty much always a possibility. On the other hand, they're also generally fairly open to add things as long as the developers react to concerns. I'd guess if this can be neatly stuffed in a corner and treated like any of the other Hyper-V specific drivers, and quality is okay, it has a reasonable chance to be accepted. And if it is rejected, Microsoft can still ship it in the kernels for the distros they off…

Yeah not the end of the world if it doesn't land immediately, based on the original devs responding that they'd rather find the right place for it than the expedient place for it

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#174

Post by nitrogen »

Iv wrote: post #122
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a possibility Linux upstream won't accept it?

Why would it? That's a functionality that can't be used without Microsoft proprietary parts. Unless I missed something, I don't think there is an open source implementation of DirectX somewhere? I doubt the linux devs ever see WLS as a target they have to maintain themselves.

Wine has an open source implementation of DirectX, FWIW.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#175

Post by bitcrazed »

lucasyvas wrote: post #145
me551ah wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>>There's also the question of whether or not you believe WSL as a whole is good or bad for Linux. IMO it's a good thing. Given that windows accounts for 90%+ of the desktop OS share, Windows might very well become the world's most used Linux distro.

It is, of course, decidedly not a Linux distro though. If it was, it wouldn't be an issue. I think there are positives, but it looks a lot like "Extend" to me. I can't even say I wouldn't use it - it might be nice! But I will not use any WSL-only capability, that's for sure.

Hi. Microsoft PM working on WSL, Terminal and Windows.

WSL2 literally runs user-mode distros (and their binaries) in containers atop a shared Linux kernel image (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel) inside a lightweight VM that can boot an image from cold in So when you run a binary/distro on WSL2, you are LITERALLY running on Linux in a VM alongside all your favorite Windows apps and tools.

If some of the tools you run within WSL can take advantage of the machine's available GPUs etc. and integrate well with the Windows desktop & tools, then you benefit. As do the many Windows users who want/need to run Linux apps & tools but cannot dual-boot and/or who can't switch to Linux full-time.

This will (and already has) resulted in MANY Windows users getting access to Linux for the first time, or first time in a while, and are now enjoying the best of both worlds.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#176

Post by NOGDP »

lostmsu wrote: post #166
rezonant wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the purpose is for devs who are deploying to Linux, their toolchain may not fully work in Windows, but they want to have a similar dev/test env within Windows... pretty much the whole point of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It's not that the frameworks don't work on Windows, it's the deployment tech, like Docker, Ansible, their build scripts etc etc. Some users may be doing something totally custom on t…

Do people actually use Docker and Ansible a lot for ML??? Doing something custom on top of the GPU is also not much different on Windows, than Linux. CUDA is basically the same. OpenCL and Vulkan are available too. I'd like to hear perspective of a person, who actually does ML specifically on Linux for some reason.

I do all of my development on linux, if I can, but to be honest the GPU support is generally better on windows because that seems to be the main platform AMD and NVIDIA target - though linux support is not too bad. GPU support is the only potential benefit in using windows that I can think of though. Everything from package management, to build tools, FOSS support, community, troubleshooting, etc. is generally better on linux.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#177

Post by bitcrazed »

mauflows wrote: post #149
improv32 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

I've had trouble researching if WSL2 is in fact a hyper-v managed VM. I've seen some documentation referring to WSL2 as a tightly integrated Krypton (scaled down hyper-V) VM. It seems to imply the host overhead isn't as high as a guest on hyper-V

WSL uses a Hyper-V derived virtual machine that is

* Sparse & light - they only allocate resources from the host when needed, and release them back to the host when freed * Fast - it can boot a WSL distro from cold in Full Hyper-V VMs aim to (generally) grab all the resources they can and keep hold of those resources as long as possible in case they're needed. Full VMs are designed to run for months-years at a time.

WSL's VMs are MUCH less impactful on the host - FWIW, I run 2-3 WSL distros at a time on my 4 year old 16GB Surface Pro 4 and don't even notice that they're running.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#178

Post by quantummkv »

Rusky wrote: post #61
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.

In the linked thread the Microsoft developers explicitly deny that this is the intent, if that's worth anything to you. The goal, rather, is to take all the usual (for the Linux side) GPU stuff and give it access to the Windows host's GPU, when running on WSL. That is, they are already working on getting OpenGL/Vulkan/etc. to run on top of this: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/intr... Rather t…

> In the linked thread the Microsoft developers explicitly deny that this is the intent

Unfortunately, the developers don't call the shots in there. And the ones calling the shots don't give a single damn about these developers.

Microsoft is back to it's old shenanigans after a big PR blitz.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#179

Post by NOGDP »

bitcrazed wrote: post #172
hetspookjee wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with GPU accelerated development is quite horrible on Windows for anything other than the NVIDIA prepped docker container. There was always something missing or some drover was incompatible. In the long run I have always regretted developping Python on Windows, also often because whatever was developped was to be deployed on a Linux box. I do not think it's purely windows to blame here though. It's only…

Hi. PM on Windows & WSL here. Imagine if you could run AI/ML apps and tools that are coded to take advantage of DirectML on Windows and/or atop DirectML via WSL. Now you can run the tools you want and need in whichever environment you like ... on any (capable) GPU you like: You don't have to buy a particular vendor's GPU to run your code. If you're old like me and remember the dark ol' days when games shipped with sp…

> If you're old like me and remember the dark ol' days when games shipped with specific drivers for (early) GPU cards/chips, but failed to run at all if you didn't have one of the supported cards, you'll understand why this is a big deal.

Maybe I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember the days when microsoft was intentionally degrading opengl performance on windows ;).

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#180

Post by numpad0 »

lostmsu wrote: post #166
rezonant wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the purpose is for devs who are deploying to Linux, their toolchain may not fully work in Windows, but they want to have a similar dev/test env within Windows... pretty much the whole point of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It's not that the frameworks don't work on Windows, it's the deployment tech, like Docker, Ansible, their build scripts etc etc. Some users may be doing something totally custom on t…

Do people actually use Docker and Ansible a lot for ML??? Doing something custom on top of the GPU is also not much different on Windows, than Linux. CUDA is basically the same. OpenCL and Vulkan are available too. I'd like to hear perspective of a person, who actually does ML specifically on Linux for some reason.

Docker at this point is InstallShield infrastructure for startup production quality freewares
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