[HN Gopher] DirectX on Linux
___________________________________________________________________
DirectX on Linux
Author : modeless
Score : 42 points
Date : 2020-05-19 22:28 UTC (32 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (lkml.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (lkml.org)
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| 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
| stefan_ wrote:
| 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_.
| zakk wrote:
| I remember when DirectX was a huge obstacle to porting games to
| Linux. This feels like a great, great victory for Linux to me!
| mmm_grayons wrote:
| > 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 cloud compute, too, and Microsoft is
| betting big on cloud as its future growth area.
|
| > Only the rendering/compute aspect of the GPU are projected to
| the virtual machine, no display functionality is exposed.
|
| The Linux gaming folks will be pretty sad about this one. Anyway,
| this isn't really a Linux port of DirectX. This is GPU compute
| via DirectX APIs.
|
| So now, I'm just waiting on monitor mode/AF_PACKET for WSL...
| modeless wrote:
| 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 DirectX is ported. D3D is there.
| Mic92 wrote:
| 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.
| modeless wrote:
| CUDA is supported as well.
| raphlinus wrote:
| Yes, (almost) everybody doing machine learning is on CUDA.
| There are multiple pieces of this work, and the DirectX API's
| are only part of it. Other pieces get CUDA running as well.
|
| And yet another piece is a layer to get OpenCL workloads
| running on DX12 as well, rather similar in scope to how
| MoltenVK and the gfx-hal Vulkan Portability work are a layer
| to get Vulkan workloads running on Metal. This is a big
| effort, and it seems to me their goal is to get things to the
| point where stuff Just Works and you don't have to think too
| hard about the various bits of (technically difficult!)
| infrastructure to get you there.
| raphlinus wrote:
| The associated blog post
| (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/)
| does have more details on exposing display functionality. There
| is no swapchain functionality yet, but it's clear they're
| working on it, and part of the work is "DxCore", which seems to
| be a cleaned up and simplified version of DXGI. So not now, but
| soon.
| christoph-heiss wrote:
| FYI:
|
| _This is the first draft of the Microsoft Virtual GPU (vGPU)
| driver. The driver exposes a paravirtualized GPU to user mode
| applications running in a virtual machine on a Windows host. This
| enables hardware acceleration in environment such as WSL (Windows
| Subsystem for Linux) where the Linux virtual machine is able to
| share the GPU with the Windows host._
|
| So this isn't actual "DirectX on Linux", just a driver for a
| virtual GPU exposed to WSL-guests to enable guests to directly
| use DirectX, more or less.
|
| Probably most useful for Azure-based projects.
| jagger27 wrote:
| The linked blog post in TFA has a clearer title: "DirectX is
| coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux"
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| The Year of the linux desktop has come
| wmf wrote:
| ...and extend. I'm sure this architecture was easier for MS but
| it opens the door to code that runs on WSL2 that doesn't run on
| regular Linux.
| modeless wrote:
| 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.
| wmf wrote:
| _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.
| [deleted]
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2020-05-19 23:00 UTC)