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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

#331

Post by monocasa »

isatty wrote: post #211
monocasa wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 useca…

> 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).

Meanwhile today, Nvidia and AMD GPUs don't support SR-IOV. So that's a non-starter. It's also not clear that it the right model for GPUs either, as they have their own MMUs already.

> Kvm setups can already pass through gpus just fine.

But you need to dedicate that GPU to the guest and the host can't use it anymore.

>> > 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

From the current patch set, because they haven't hooked up the swap chains yet (as they've said that they're doing) which would allow full graphics support in the guest.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#332

Post by AlexMax »

dazzawazza wrote: post #274
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…

As a FreeBSD user I find this kind of comment hilarious given I see Linux specific code littering upstream open source projects with no thought for other platforms on a regular basis. I occasionally see resistance to fixing these issues as well.

Frankly, I don't see what's so funny.

I don't presume to know if EEE is Microsoft's strategy here, but if it is, do you think a fleeting moment of amusement at Linux's comeuppance is worth the damage done to the larger open source ecosystem in its wake? Linux and FreeBSD are on the same team here.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#333

Post by rapind »

m12k wrote: post #264
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…

Look, I'm not saying saying we should "trust" Microsoft not to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish if they could - but they can't and they know it, so that's not their strategy. EEE was hinged entirely on the dominance of Windows and IE for the Extinguish phase. They won on desktop, but today most of the action has moved to mobile (where Windows lost completely to iOS and Android) and webservers (where Linux is massively dom…

So what you're saying is "Developers, Developers, Developers!"?

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#334

Post by monocasa »

chrsw wrote: post #327
monocasa wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also ported OpenCL and OpenGL to it via Mesa. Vulkan is in the works, and you can use CUDA if the host GPU supports it. Would y'all be so worked up about VMWare upstreaming their virtual GPU bridge?

Depends. If VMWare had the history Microsoft had one would be naive not to get "so worked up".

VMWare is probably the company with the worse reputation than Microsoft since they spent more than a decade shipping large part of Linux linked against their proprietary hypervisor in a blatant GPL violation.

And yet here's where their paravirtualized GPU driver lives https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#335

Post by leeter »

lawik wrote: post #235
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…

I find this a cynical take as far as EEE goes. But even with Microsofts mostly solid efforts into open source I find myself a bit skeptical as well. Most recently with the Live Share extension for VS Code. From skimming the licensing it is only to be used with the Visual Studio family of products. Which is an incredibly disappointing approach. I think this is simply about ML and GPU compute for WSL. And I think Micro…

I think it is as well, honestly the DX12 part of this is DOA as far as I'm concerned because it's not open source. So that leaves the better support for other APIs as the key delivered feature. Could MS fix that by setting DX12 up as an open to implement API and open sourcing much of this? Yes. But until they do you're better of using the various translation layers from DX to vulkan when using linux even on WSL.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#336

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

m12k wrote: post #264
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…

Look, I'm not saying saying we should "trust" Microsoft not to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish if they could - but they can't and they know it, so that's not their strategy. EEE was hinged entirely on the dominance of Windows and IE for the Extinguish phase. They won on desktop, but today most of the action has moved to mobile (where Windows lost completely to iOS and Android) and webservers (where Linux is massively dom…

> In those domains, they are no longer the 500 pound gorilla in the room, they're the "hey, fellow kids" oldtimer trying to fit in and get in on a piece of the action.

Said of a company which owns a market-shaping player in every layer of the stack: OS, directory, database, applications, development languages, source code repository, and the second-biggest cloud to host it all in. Given that mobile and web involve about half of that list, I fail to see how they're some sort of non-player, trying to play "catchup" to the rest of the world now.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#337

Post by ori_b »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #293
traverseda wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of that is coming from redhat/IBM, which is currently doing their own take on EEE. Believe me I get pissy about that too.

Honest question, is your opinion that we should have been stuck with something like SysVinit just so it's more convenient for the BSDs, while the likes of RedHat contribute the majority of the work? And if yes, can you point to an example of *BSD doing something similar while pushing their platform forward?

> Honest question, is your opinion that we should have been stuck with something like SysVinit just so it's more convenient for the BSDs,

BSD init is far better than Sysv. Adopting it would have been a step forward.

There are also other init systems that are better designed, like openrc or runit.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#338

Post by ori_b »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #313
simias wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a loaded way to frame the question, some of us were just fine being "stuck" with SysVinit. I try not to get dragged into systemd flamewars because life is too short but it's disingenuous to claim that before systemd init systems were some kind of inescapable hellscape. I administrate multiple systemd-based linux distros, FreeBSD servers and buildroot-based embedded systems and I can tell you that systemd stil…

> systemd still gets in my way regularly while the sh-based init systems tend to Just Work For me systemd based systems allow me to have declarative, portable unit files where init scripts don't. They allow me to reliably monitor and restart services, they shut things down properly instead of just force killing as many init scripts end up doing. I instantly know how to manage most major distros now that systemd's com…

> For me systemd based systems allow me to have declarative, portable unit files where init scripts don't.

Portable to what?

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#339

Post by bluedino »

jholman wrote: post #309
dgellow wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Chocolate and peanut butter is amazing . And yes, as a sibling notes, Reese's peanut butter cups are actually alarmingly tasty, but.... as with any $1 chocolate bar, that's shitty HFCS-saturated chocolate and shitty palm-oil-laced peanut butter, with way too much sugar in it, so if you're too good for that, well, that's a credit to your tastebuds, good on ya. So eat real chocolate with real peanut butter. Real peanut…

You should try a buckeye! It's basically peanut butter wrapped in chocolate, giving an appearance similar to a buckeye nut.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#340

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #214
yuribro wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> ... shove Ubuntu into a VirtualBox and run it on their Windows box in seamless mode

Given that the WSL2 rewrite is essentially this, without even the niceties of a VirtualBox GUI wrapper to control the settings, I keep wondering what all the fuss is about.

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