Live data from Hacker News

DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

devblogs.microsoft.com

521–530 of 548 posts

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you completely. I think that the comment I was replying to thinks otherwise.

No, I was just a little more abiguous due to a left out word or two than I intended. >>> I think if that really matters you should be against Should be interpreted as (and I meant to write as) >>> I think if that really matters to you you should be against The rest of the comment should have made that obvious though, especially the last two paragraphs.

Now I get your intention, the original phrasing made me it parse it incorrectly.

Happy to know that we also agree then.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#522
post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies, including the one I work for, have most development happening on Windows. It is far easier to manage for Enterprise use-cases, with all relevant services integrated and obtained from a single vendor. Not to mention that there are quite a few development environments for more obscure platforms that still only exist for Windows. Overall, since most development time is spent in an IDE, the OS is really o…

Sure, companies may love it, but developers hate it. I use a Windows laptop at the company I currently work for, because everything is locked down and I wouldn't be able to get my own laptop connected to the network. (Or so I thought; I co-worker managed to use the Windows laptop as a bridge to his own Macbook.) Now you're right that as long as I stay in the IDE, it's not so bad. But every once in a while I need to d…

You generally have some good points, and some points that have more to do with preferences, or luck with hardware. I would note that the lack of anti-virus software is one of the reasons a lot of companies don't want to run Linux on employee systems. Locked-in Windows systems at least have the advantage that even if you Run as Administrator some .exe that you got emailed, there is a good chance that your AV will not allow it to run; if you're running something as sudo on Linux...

> And then there's the total lack of access control. To install anything, you need to be admin. I gave my son a restricted account, but he can't do anything with it. I'd like to be able to create an account that can instal games, but can't compromise the system. No such option in Windows. If you can do anything, you can do everything. Unless you're in an enterprise environment, in which case you often still can't do anything. So I guess more detailed access control does exist, but only for enterprise users or something.

Here I never understand this point. You can't do anything on a Linux system if you don't have sudo access - it's not like apt or yum have any special magic to allow non-admin users to install stuff. And if you can install software on a system, you can already do anything else. Especially Games, which install drivers to perform DRM and anti-cheat bull.

Now, if you want to look into it and waste quite a bit of time, Windows does allow you to configure access control at a very fine-grained level for access to non-system folders. But as long as the installers want to install things in system folders, there really isn't any solution.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is mostly true for me when trying to use a Linux desktop. However, if I'm using IntelliJ or Emacs and Firefox, I don't really need to care what OS is running underneath too much. Edit: of course, Linux and Mac are available for devs that prefer them. It's still much easier for IT to manage 7000 Windows desktops and a couple hundred Linux ones than it would be to manage 7000 Linux desktops.

I'm not sure I agree with that. 7k "normal" machines for any given value of "normal" seems like it would always be easier than 7k "normal" machines and 200 oddballs. Is the sysadmin tooling for Windows really that much better?

Are there even systems for managing many desktop machines running Linux?

- Could you push a patch to Linux systems and have it install at the user's convenience (with some end date)?

- Can you do that in waves without manually configuring things?

- Can you remotely wipe a system if required?

- Is there any popular anti-virus software for Linux, to protect company files in home folders from user mistakes?

- Can you help users install some software without giving them full access, but also without requiring IT intervention for every installation?

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same is mostly true for me when trying to use a Linux desktop. However, if I'm using IntelliJ or Emacs and Firefox, I don't really need to care what OS is running underneath too much. Edit: of course, Linux and Mac are available for devs that prefer them. It's still much easier for IT to manage 7000 Windows desktops and a couple hundred Linux ones than it would be to manage 7000 Linux desktops.

> It's still much easier for IT to manage 7000 Windows desktops and a couple hundred Linux ones than it would be to manage 7000 Linux desktops. Why? I have never seen Windows being managed entirely hands-off whereas Linux just works.

I don't understand what "being managed entirely hands-off" means. I can assure you there is no manual intervention from IT on every desktop system in the fleet, so I would call that exactly "being managed hands-off". I am certain there are always a few systems that do need some manual intervention for whatever reason, but that seems to just be the way with computers. It's not like Ubuntu updates never break, or no one ever gets to install a broken package before it is retracted.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

O365 is SaaS. Customers that are hosting Exchange on-prem are being encouraged to move to O365 for email. Same for SharePoint. If I had to guess, O365 is helping to reduce, not grow, the market share of Windows server.

What's important is that server-side services that Microsoft offers are replacing Linux servers. Whether it's SaaS like Office365 or more traditional server software like Exchange and Sharepoint is not crucial.

Except that Linux usage on Azure has surpassed that of Windows a long time ago...

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's still much easier for IT to manage 7000 Windows desktops and a couple hundred Linux ones than it would be to manage 7000 Linux desktops. Why? I have never seen Windows being managed entirely hands-off whereas Linux just works.

I don't understand what "being managed entirely hands-off" means. I can assure you there is no manual intervention from IT on every desktop system in the fleet, so I would call that exactly "being managed hands-off". I am certain there are always a few systems that do need some manual intervention for whatever reason, but that seems to just be the way with computers. It's not like Ubuntu updates never break, or no on…

I mean with 'entirely hands-off' that the computer just keep on running. On Linux, most packages are part of the repository and update automatically. On Windows, those packages have to be updated manually. Even if everything is automated, the computer will have to be restarted quite regularly. At least to me, Windows seems to be more difficult, especially if you have a fleet of desktop systems that can be chosen to be perfectly Linux compatible.

Where does the complexity on Linux come from that makes managing them more difficult?

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do that today with Qemu and PCI-passthrough. You just boot a VM, and pass it a physical grapics card. Check out https://old.reddit.com/r/VFIO/ I guess this will be the standard until we can have nicer graphics drivers for Linux.

That requires two GPUs though, one for the guest and one for the host.

Yes, this is true, I use my on-board Intel graphics card for my host, and my Nvidia card for my guest operating system.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's important is that server-side services that Microsoft offers are replacing Linux servers. Whether it's SaaS like Office365 or more traditional server software like Exchange and Sharepoint is not crucial.

Except that Linux usage on Azure has surpassed that of Windows a long time ago...

And I was talking specifically about Microsoft products like Office365, Exchange, and Sharepoint.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#529
post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this question misses the point but how did AMD avoid this issue? Are their drivers open source?

AMD started to support the development of the open source driver several years ago by publishing hardware specs. . I am not sure if they switched completely or are still maintaining a closed source driver on the side - I haven't bought AMD cards in years, my last one only "works" with the binary blob. The people working on the NVIDIA open source driver have no official support and were fighting with signed firmware b…

Single data point here but I just switched from an NVIDIA GTX 960 (2015 card) to an AMD RX 570 (2017), both using open source drivers, and the performance improvement in Wayland/Sway is huge.

My understanding is that even 2015 is too new for nouveau to run with high performance due to something called reclocking, where the card starts up at a minimal clock rate and then it's up to the drivers to reconfigure it for running at the advertised clock.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#530

I really wish Microsoft would just tell NVidia (and AMD) to support SR-IOV on all their GPUs. Then we wouldn't need any major software changes to enable CUDA acceleration within VMs, just a configuration change to pass through a virtual function of the GPU to make it available to existing drivers.

SR-IOV doesn't make sense on most GPUs, because they have their own MMUs already with different semantics. SR-IOV is terrible for dealing with a large bank of RAM on the target device, because the MMU is in the wrong part of the architecture. It's all the way on the root complex, so all GPU VRAM reads and writes would need to take the slow path through PCI-E and back. This is basically a nonstarter for GPUs that have…

How does AMD deal with this on their server discrete GPUs that support SR-IOV?
Post reply on HN