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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

#31

Post by cududa »

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.

A bit of a tip, your university development experience is not going to be like anything you see in production

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#33

Post by cududa »

stefan_ wrote: post #15

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 .

Did you even read the article or comprehend it? This isn’t DirectX for Linux. It’s DirectX access for WSL compute

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#34

Post by INTPenis »

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!

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I interpret this as being only a bridge to DirectX from the Linux kernel. Not a DX implementation on Linux.

You won't be able to take this dxgkrnl driver and load it into a Linux workstation and get DirectX.

And also, someone else responded to you what's the point of running Linux if Windows can do everything Linux can.

I would assume that most full time Linux users are using it out of at least a tiny bit of ideological motivation. And if not ideological then habitual, having had the power and granular transparency of Linux for so many years that Windows would never be an alternative.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#35

Post by badRNG »

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!

> This feels like a great, great victory for Linux to me!

Why?

This is not DirectX on the Linux desktop, it is DirectX for WSL. This means that code written for this will NOT function on desktop Linux.

Additionally, support for DirectX for WSL is support not spent on Vulkan and OpenGL.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#37

Post by rrss »

stefan_ wrote: post #15

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 .

I doubt Microsoft really cares. Microsoft will ship it in the linux kernel in WSL2, and people will use it, and if the upstream community doesn't want it I don't see why Microsoft would have a problem with that.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#38

Post by rasz »

wmf wrote: post #17
modeless wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We definitely wouldnt want a stable driver API! NDISwrapper was a huge step in the right direction.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#39

Post by [deleted] »

modeless wrote: post #10
_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…

Yes, machine learning is the first priority as they say in the thread. However, the blog post goes on to say that window system integration is coming. This will eventually be a full graphics stack. > Anyway, this isn't really a Linux port of DirectX The entire user mode side of Direct3D is ported, in addition to the user mode parts of the Nvidia, AMD, and Intel graphics drivers.

[deleted]

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#40

Post by mkl »

woadwarrior01 wrote: post #12

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

From the linked blog post [1], it sounds like it: "In addition to CUDA support, we are also bringing support for NVIDIA-docker tools within WSL. The same containerized GPU workload that executes in the cloud can run as-is inside of WSL."

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/

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