Microsoft Announces Direct3D 12 For Linux / WSL2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft Announces Direct3D 12 For Linux / WSL2

As part of bringing GPU acceleration to WSL2 that was announced at today's virtual Build conference, Microsoft just published a blog post with more details including their port of Direct3D 12 for Linux...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-DX12-WSL2

[mos87]

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/general-discussion/1179443-microsoft-president-brad-smith-acknowledges-they-were-previously-wrong-on-open-source?p=1179446#post1179446

Extend

[C8292]

• There are a lot of machine-learning libs that are linux-only
• Developers need to develop
• They move to linux
• Cycle repeats
• Microsoft needs to stop the desktop-developers users bleed
• how?
• we need to keep developers on windows
• support GPU on WSL so that developers keep using windows desktop on linux libs

this is the only reason i see here for this to happen

[wagaf]

They are trying to stop the DirectX to Vulkan bleeding.

It's probably gonna fail unless they provide DirectX as an open standard as well as implementations for macOS/iOS/PlayStation..

However I guess it's a blessing for Wine/Linux gaming.

[vipor29]

you know i have been hearing this extend stuff for years guess what its not happening they would of killed it by now.there is new people at microsoft that do believe that open source is the future and people find it very hard to believe which is understandable.this is huge and people don't see it.this is not gates or ballmer anymore.

[M1kkko]

Embrace - Extend - Extinquish

Are we now at part 2?

[L_A_G]

Sounds like textbook "Embrace - Extend - Extinguish", except stupid instead of maliciously trying to prevent competing platforms from being able to make any market headway. Who in their right mind would write a DX12 front end for a Linux application, causing it to be stuck in WSL, or move an application with a DX12 front end onto Linux without re-writing that front end and cursing it to the same fate? All you're doing by using this is creating ungodly abominations that are stuck on a vendor specific virtual machine environment.

Then again this is probably just there to make it easier to port Linux applications onto Windows as more of a step-by-step process rather than all in one big go. Alternatively it's also going to make it easier to port Windows applications with DX12 front ends onto Linux as a more step-by-step process.

[Terrablit]

I'm more interested on whether this could be used for virtualization purposes, like if we could use this as a target for stuff like Virgil to get free D3D support in VMs.

Probably a lot of thankless reversing. As long as we can expose Vulkan functionality to VM guests, the rest will be relatively simple.

[Scellow]

• There are a lot of machine-learning libs that are linux-only
• Developers need to develop
• They move to linux
• Cycle repeats
• Microsoft needs to stop the desktop-developers users bleed
• how?
• we need to keep developers on windows
• support GPU on WSL so that developers keep using windows desktop on linux libs

this is the only reason i see here for this to happen

wrong

people move to linux because:

- win10 is giant slow and bloated piece of crap
- win10 is a spyware
- NTFS is slow

Microsoft killed their desktop developpers because they gave up with desktop, look at all the crappy stack they push, UWP, XAML, MSIX, C# dotnet core, all that crap is responsible of the desktop dev bleed

They all moved to macOS because APIs are nicer, they got a better statically AOT compiled language (Swift), there is a real App Store, and everything is butter smooth and efficient
Same for linux, everything there is smooth

[harakiru]

This is very worrying news for freedom and Gnu/Linux. I hope developers and users see the long lasting implications of their choices and use Vulkan instead of directx. We must reject non-free standards. This is no doubt an evil concocted plan by microsoft to "Embrace - Extend - Extinguish".