Hacker News Reader

Comment by me551ah | Hacker News Reader

>>>There's also the question of whether or not you believe WSL as a whole is good or bad for Linux.

IMO it's a good thing. Given that windows accounts for 90%+ of the desktop OS share, Windows might very well become the world's most used Linux distro.

View on HN

It is, of course, decidedly not a Linux distro though. If it was, it wouldn't be an issue. I think there are positives, but it looks a lot like "Extend" to me.

I can't even say I wouldn't use it - it might be nice! But I will not use any WSL-only capability, that's for sure.

My understanding is that this is meant to become transparent to the user, that really this is about enablement of hardware acceleration within WSL, and that the typical Linux userland graphics APIs like OpenGL would layer on top. So the goal isn't to get you to link to libdx12 or whatever it is they have here, it's actually a piece that will be used by Mesa to provide accelerated GL for plain old Linux apps to use when running in WSL. It seems like the easiest bite off the apple was offscreen rendering and GPGPU functionality, but the MS devs seem willing to work with the kernel devs to rearch it so it fits into the typical Linux graphics stack ie DRI and other lower level systems. As far as I understand, this would be required for, say, Wayland to be able to have hardware acceleration when running in WSL.

I'm still piecing it all together, and I definitely feel that "Extend" feeling, but I'm not sure that's what's happening here. Looks more like a few devs at MS are trying to solve the GPU Accel use case for WSL...

The DirectML API is not otherwise available on Linux. If it promises cross vendor support (which is a good thing) tools and libraries will use it.

Those tools and libraries will then not work on native Linux.

Hi. Microsoft PM working on WSL, Terminal and Windows.

WSL2 literally runs user-mode distros (and their binaries) in containers atop a shared Linux kernel image (https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel) inside a lightweight VM that can boot an image from cold in < 2s and which aggressively releases resources back to the host when freed.

So when you run a binary/distro on WSL2, you are LITERALLY running on Linux in a VM alongside all your favorite Windows apps and tools.

If some of the tools you run within WSL can take advantage of the machine's available GPUs etc. and integrate well with the Windows desktop & tools, then you benefit. As do the many Windows users who want/need to run Linux apps & tools but cannot dual-boot and/or who can't switch to Linux full-time.

This will (and already has) resulted in MANY Windows users getting access to Linux for the first time, or first time in a while, and are now enjoying the best of both worlds.

The question isn't asking whether you, a Windows user who runs Windows, benefit. The question is asking what it does to Linux users who don't run Windows even a little. (And I think you know that.)

That's like asking whether Linux users who don't run ESXi benefit from their paravirtualized drivers being upstreamed. No, they don't, but they were accepted with way less bruhaha. And that's despite VMWare blatantly violating the GPL for more than a decade.

With DirectX on WSL, you can do new things when Linux is running on Windows (via WSL). But these new things aren't possible when Linux is running another way (e.g. on the bare metal).

So people who use it are married to Windows.

I think folks would be absolutely excited if this was an initiative to allow writing DirectX applications on Linux, and available for Linux on bare metal. But as people realize this marries them to Windows, they go meh.

They're not intending d3d to be the client library, they ported Mesa for OpenGL and OpenCl, and are working on a Vulkan port for all of that.

I think the concern with this DirectX implementation is that it only works for WSL users, not standard Linux users. So, it's a software API that will only work in your ecosystem, not the overall Linux ecosystem.

If DirectX on Linux could also work on bare metal, the conversation here would likely be different.

IMO it's exactly embrace extend extinguish that parent noted that can be spun to kick CUDA out of the game for Linux which is good in short term.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com