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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

#431

Post by boudin »

ghusbands wrote: post #401
boudin wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Wine has a different architecture because distributing microsoft binaries is not legal, so technically it's not the same thing, but it still does an amazing job and a lot of apps/games works flawlessly.

And a lot don't. And then you have to spend a lot of time researching why and messing around with config options and maybe even compilers. And the games sometimes stop working after an update. Conversely, if you run Windows, it's rare that you need to work hard to run a game.

This is definitely not my experience. Off my 100 games on steam, gog and egs, 2 doesn't work straight out of the box. - rocksmith 2014 that can work by switching to alsa audio but the audio lag make the experience subpar - bit trip beat that i know can work by changing something but didn't try

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#432

Post by wicket »

mwcampbell wrote: post #426
wicket wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's hyperbolic. If someone has sent you an email in plain text with wrapped lines, your mail client will know this and it would be reasonable to assume that perhaps the sender may be using a mail client not capable of rendering HTML emails nor autowrapping long lines. It would be a sensible choice to format the reply in the same format as that of the email received. By stating "HTML email has features…

I think what we have here isn't a deliberate effort to extinguish a standard, but a clash between two different cultures. LKML follows traditional hacker norms, from the days of actual terminals and slow connections, whereas Outlook is built for the world of GUIs, WYSIWYG, and more or less high-speed connections. The latter is what the vast majority of people have chosen, so it's a sensible business decision for Micr…

I appreciate your sentiment, but I don't know, I'm not convinced. You can have all the GUIs and WYSIWYGs you want, but as I said, email replies should default to the same format as that of those received. Thunderbird (a modern email client) does this, if I recall correctly. It's very easy to avoid this mess.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#433

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

cycloptic wrote: post #430
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

....Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for. You wonder why people ignore your platform? Saying it isn't actually a single platform and instead is dozens of different platforms just means each of those platforms is even less relevant. Saying you're not just one platform with 10% market share but actually 20 with 0.5% each doesn't make the case for shipping on Linux Desktop any bette…

I'm not making a case for shipping on the "Linux desktop" because that doesn't exist and has never been a real platform. Most smaller distros are not trying to be "relevant" to whatever the gaming community's fad of the day is. They're perfectly fine filling what niche they do. If you want to target those smaller distros as a platform, you can give them some source code to work with, or you can pay all the cost of ma…

So what are you saying? Developers should just choose a major distro and target that, then get all the flack for issues their product has on every distro that isn't supported? Because that's basically what's already happening and developers hate it, which is why they often don't ship on Linux at all.

And many proprietary pieces of software license components from other proprietary pieces of software, so that even if they did want to open their code they'd have to strip pieces out of it anyway which doesn't really help the cause of distros integrating it. And even if it did, then the developers are reliant on the maintainers for their relationship to their customers. Have an issue with the product? Oh, it turns out that's because of this patch made by the maintainer of the package for that distro, who now has to be contacted and convinced to fix it, which they may decide not to for arbitrary reasons. Even open source developers have problems with this!

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#434

Post by codys »

monocasa wrote: post #359
lalaland1125 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that this would expose a normal Linux GPU API. The blog post and the thread on the kernel mailing list seem quite clear in that this is explicitly designed with the goal of exposing the Windows driver API and associated client APIs like DirectX. From the email introducing the set of patches: > The projection is accomplished by exposing the WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model…

> I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that this would expose a normal Linux GPU API. The fact that they went through the effort of porting Mesa to get OpenGL and Open CL support, and are working on Vulkan support.

The standard for Linux gpu access is the dri/drm kernel interface, not the new wsl specific api they've added.

Their porting Mesa to use a proprietary library that interacts with the wsl only kernel interface isn't that same as behaving like a standard Linux gpu

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#435

Post by quantummkv »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #375
quantummkv wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Microsoft is back to it's old shenanigans after a big PR blitz. And your evidence being what exactly? Yes, they’ve done EEE before, but there’s no evidence that they are doing it now. It’s been two decades .

This announcement is the evidence. They release some directx stubs that are completely useless outside of windows and of absolutely zero importance to anyone in the Linux Ecosystem and make a huge Microsoft hearts Linux push with it with confetti, unicorns and blushing dev-twitter influencers.

While the actual meat of directx will still be proprietary and windows-exclusive where they call the shots and make the money.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#436

Post by generalk »

m12k wrote: post #394
generalk wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression here is that Windows Subsystem for Linux will support DX12, but not broader Linux support for DX12. So if you want a machine that can play games and run a Linux dev toolchain, that would require a Windows install. If you can incentivize folks who may never have installed Windows to do so, and keep them there as the only place they can both play games and use their preferred…

I agree, when we look at Microsoft's motivation, considering them driven by profit makes more sense than anything else. Hence why I'm critiquing comments that seem to think Microsoft is driven by some innate desire to destroy Linux and FOSS. They're not, they just want to make money, but back when their making money was based on Windows, and they thought Linux was an existential threat to that, those two goals coinci…

We're not talking about Microsoft's cloud / server strategy though. Linux as a server OS is different from Linux as a development platform. The two have nothing in common except the word "Linux."

Microsoft is taking steps to embrace desktop Linux, we've seen that with WSL. Instead of ditching Windows for a different/better dev platform, just keep using Windows.

They are extending their own desktop Linux by adding the capability to use DX12 in Linux, so long as it's run on Windows. Note that they are not adding this capability to a straight Ubuntu install, let alone any other distribution.

To claim "Microsoft knows they can't Extinguish desktop Linux" is naive at best, and shill-like at worst. They don't need to completely eliminate desktop Linux for EEE to apply here. the "Extinguish" part comes naturally from fewer and fewer devs choosing an alternative to Windows.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#437

Post by codys »

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #347
gmanley wrote: post #120

I found this reply to be especially interesting: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/19/1309 > I also have another concern from a legal standpoint I'd rather not review the ioctl part of this. I'd probably request other DRI developers abstain as well. > This is a Windows kernel API being smashed into a Linux driver. I don't want to be tainted by knowledge of an API that I've no idea of the legal status of derived works. (it…

On the other hand, if Microsoft themselves are publishing this code as open source, on the open, on one of the most important projects out there, and are actively asking other experts from other companies to review it, I would imagine they are weakening their arguments on the potential litigation.

Only for copyright claims. Patent claims are not diminished by publishing items and asking for review. We can see this in the various video codec and other standards that publish a bunch of info that is covered extensively by patents.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#438

Post by lostmsu »

mcv wrote: post #236
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.

But Windows is a painful OS to use for anything other than gaming. Ideally, I'd like to see the exact opposite of this: run Linux with a Windows subsystem just for gaming.

Painful? What exactly is painful? Apart from the Settings/Control Panel debacle, I don't know any issues you could be facing on Windows, unless you do a lot of C/C++ development which is still problematic due to the lack of a proper package manager.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#439

Post by cs702 »

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…

Keep in mind, a ton of people and companies are asking for this, because they genuinely want to use hardware-accelerated PyTorch and TensorFlow "through a Linux-thingy" on Windows.

BUT I MUST AGREE WITH YOU that, over time, this is likely to fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to develop software that works only in Windows "with the Linux-thingy installed" environments.

That's because sooner or later, people using Windows will publish important AI papers or release must-have software or do something else with code that runs only on Windows "with the Linux-thingy installed." The "Linux-thingy" becomes a dependency that gets installed in the background. It becomes a near-invisible component of Windows, abstracted away by layers of Microsoft APIs, code, standards, etc.

The "Linux-thingy" on Windows, in other words, becomes like an init system on Linux, which can eventually be replaced in whole or in part without most people caring or noticing. Most Linux users don't care if their Linux machine uses Systemd, a Sys V Init, or even the dead-ended Upstart. That's the "Extinguish" part.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#440

Post by jamesgeck0 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #226
miffe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also adding an wayland server. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-windows-subsy...

> These changes are on the WSL’s team roadmap and you can expect to hear more about this work by holiday 2020. As if describing things in terms of northern hemisphere temperate seasons wasn’t bad enough (and still worse commonly showing how little you care about any place other than the USA and maybe Canada by using the name “fall”), now we have this: “holiday 2020”. I don’t know when this is talking about. I’d have…

Holiday == November or December. Thanksgiving and Christmas are the big ones, but we use generic terms like "holiday" to accommodate people who celebrate different holidays around those times. This is pretty common terminology; IIRC the "War on Christmas" has been a thing for a couple decades.

> I’d have guessed northern hemisphere summer school break first, but I guess that’s just about finished now

Summer break more or less just started for most students here. The fall term will start around August.

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