Meh, it's just more proprietary middleware, which is nothing unusual for the Machine Learning crowd. They don't care. Everyone will still use PyTorch or TensorF

Meh, it's just more proprietary middleware, which is nothing unusual for the Machine Learning crowd. They don't care. Everyone will still use PyTorch or TensorFlow (or just CUDA) and whether or not it directly talks with nvidia's Linux driver stack or through DirectML to the WDDM stack or through CUDA to the WDDM stack isn't relevant for most people, with one exception: training performance. The vast majority of actual large scale training and inference happens on headless servers anyway and even if it did run on Windows Server you'd just pass a PCIe card directly through to a Linux VM with Hyper-V, you already had that for a while. I see this as a response to one of WSL's most requested features by developers. "Machine Learning Support" has been a day 1 bug report, and in practice it means "Run TensorFlow/Pytorch" which in practice means "Support CUDA". Frankly if they only did that, it'd be fine (AMD DL support doesn't exist meaningfully), so the fact they went with this whole DirectML thing, allowing generic DirectX 12 compatible GPUs to work, is a surprise. It's more goodwill, in other words, for researchers/developers doing local work. Nobody is going to use these APIs directly, and those who do just need them purely as "device middleware" for the underlying hardware stack, so some generic thing can sit on top. The fact that they're working on Mesa to bring OpenGL to WSL applications, by way of WDDM/DXGI, is more evidence of this, I think, because it will not just benefit ML apps. "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" implies that Microsoft wants to subvert things and attract people to their APIs, over time, so they can do a 180. But they don't want Linux users to use DirectX APIs on Linux. They don't have time to make that happen. They want Linux users to use Linux APIs, but run them on WSL (on Windows). And those Linux users expect normal Linux software to work, out of the box, all the time. Totally different things. DirectX only is a means here, not an end. It's the same reason they went from "crazy ersatz clone of the Linux kernel inside the Windows Kernel that works 85% of the time and fails otherwise" (WSL1) to "Run ordinary Linux in a hypervisor and call it a day" (WSL2). Yeah, the first version makes nerds on Hacker News happy because it's a cool hack, but the second version actually means your Linux software will run as is, and it works for users, which is more important. They need OpenGL, and TensorFlow, and whatever, to run on WSL as they exist today to attract people. Not in some theoretical future where everyone is using DirectX APIs on Linux and then Microsoft does a backflip and says "gotcha!" It will actually be hilarious if TensorFlow-on-Linux-on-DirectML-via-WDDM could actually provide a viable mechanism to use AMD GPUs for Deep Learning, while keeping the same high level software stack.