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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

#211

Post by isatty »

monocasa wrote: post #110
kelnos wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they? In its current state, this driver is only useful when Linux is running on Windows. A regular Linux desktop/server user would not find this useful.

Azure is more than 50% Linux. There's an incredible amount of "regular" Linux instances running on top of hyper-v. This lets them use a virtualized GPU in that env. On top of that, why would canonical care what hypervisor you're running? There's so many other cases where they haven't gone "eww.. proprietary", why would they start now.

I don’t think azure is relevant here. Standardizing SR-IOV would be much more helpful to everybody (but much more important to Azure/cloud platforms). Kvm setups can already pass through gpus just fine.

This is a way to lock developers who want to run Linux code for AI/ML onto their windows machines and to keep them from switching their desktop OS to Linux.

Edit: from the kernel mailing list

> There is a single usecase for this: WSL2 developer who wants to run machine learning on his GPU. The developer is working on his laptop, which is running Windows and that laptop has a single GPU that Windows is using

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#212

Post by lostmsu »

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…

Hi!

Don't you think the effort to achieve this would be absolutely massive? I don't know what kind of resources are thrown on this project, but I'd estimate minimum to be 3 dev teams for 2 years just to get a few variations of ResNet to work "as is". And that's just for regular models, that don't require quantization or (auto-)mixed precision for training.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#213

Post by lalaland1125 »

It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook. The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment as it relies on many pieces of proprietary closed source software that Microsoft is unwilling to open source. This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to develop software that only works in WSL environments. With the "benefit" of forcing the Linux kernel developers to pay the maintenance costs of course.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#214

Post by TeMPOraL »

yuribro wrote: post #196
kbenson wrote: post #116

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. If there are people who would run a Linux desktop for development who then decide not to because WSL exists, perhaps that's a bad outcome. I think if that really matters you should be against anything in the kernel to make it work well as a VM under Windows or MacOS or BSD, and in VMware or VirtualBox too. From that poi…

> I think if that really matters you should be against anything in the kernel to make it work well as a VM under Windows or MacOS or BSD, and in VMware or VirtualBox too. Why? I would guess that a very large share of linux kernels run under a hypervisor in some data center, in a public cloud or some OpenStack cluster. Won't those mostly be the same features?

Because WSL doesn't compete with people who would otherwise run a Linux box, it competes with people who would otherwise shove Ubuntu into a VirtualBox and run it on their Windows box in seamless mode. So the idea that it drives people away from Linux proper is nonsense (BTW., WSL is Linux proper), unless you also believe that installing a Linux in a VM on a proprietary system is also driving people away.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#215

Post by dgellow »

agildehaus wrote: post #106
sandworm101 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> the migration of Windows to linux Please no. Please keep your peanut butter out of my chocolate. Call me a purist, but linux should take nothing from windows, give no ground, make no compromise. One must die for the other to live. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

Chocolate and peanut butter are pretty good together. Just sayin'.

Wait, is chocolate and peanut butter really a thing?! That sounds quite horrible to my non-US ears.

Edit: yep, an online search seems to say that's an actual thing. I guess I'm part of the ten thousand today https://xkcd.com/1053/. I will never understand the US fascination for peanut butter.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#216

Post by quietbritishjim »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #213

It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook. The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment as it relies on many pieces of proprietary closed source software that Microsoft is unwilling to open source. This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to…

According to the comment by christoph-heiss, this is just a paravirtualisation technique and will appear like a normal Limux GPU driver to applications running on WSL, rather than a special DirectX for Linux API that won't work on Linux itself.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#217

Post by mikorym »

Maybe this question has an obvious answer, but will I still need to start my X Window System for graphics to display from my WSL terminal?

My guess is that the answer is yes, but the type of applications that can be run is now extended?

Conversely, I would expect this doesn't change anything with regards to SSHuttle, which would still not work on WSL.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#219

Post by bjoernbu »

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.

Mostly doing several kinds of NLP: My actual setup is a Windows Laptop to SSH into Linux machines w/ tmux session. However, I really appreciate WSL for working offline, etc.

My main reason: It is the most convenient way to have Unix tools (grep/sort/cut/sed/less/...) and bash available. Cygwin always was a pain, MinGW / GitBash felt much better, but ultimately WSL just feels best.

These tools are incredibly valuable to my workflow. Sure, stuff like pandas can be nice for small datasets, and some data sits in some DB/Kafka/distributed system. But there have been countless cases where unix tools allowed me to take xxGB zpfiles of text and do basic examination or even build baseline models within a few hours.

Sure, there always are alternatives to use these tools and there are many equivalents. But I would always prefer WSL + conda for Linux to a typical "Windows Conda" installation with that weird GUI and the need to install so many different applications to even just look into the first or last few lines of a huge textfile.

EDIT: That said, of course I can/could always just run a juypter notebook under windows using windows cuda + GPU and share files with a WSL bash where I do my modifications. But again, everything within the same systems just feels better (ipython shell magic, no worries about if paths to the same file are really identical, etc) and while this is by no means a game-changer, it is just nicer that way.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#220

Post by srg0 »

_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…

Gaming folks won't be running games in WSL when they can just run them in W.
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