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This sounds like an attempt to win back ML segment from Linux to Windows. There are three letters back in my mind that sound like screaming, but too early to te

This sounds like an attempt to win back ML segment from Linux to Windows. There are three letters back in my mind that sound like screaming, but too early to tell unfortunately.

rvz 6y ago
In this case, this is the extend phase. So this is what they really mean about 'using Linux' and 'Microsoft <3 Linux'.
badRNG 6y ago
How is it too early to tell? It is an extension of the capability of WSL, giving you that sweet convenience of the DirectX API with your existing ML project. Of course, this extension makes your project incompatible with desktop Linux once adopted.
- dade_ 6y ago
  Not necessarily. It is not possible to access the GPU in WSL at all right now, so I need to dual boot which also means dealing with Linux desktop compatibility issues with my laptop. As long as I can use the same ML framework (without DirectX API), then this poses no compatibility issues at all. It just means I can develop & run my ML code in WSL.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    Just curious, what stops your ML code from running under Windows?
    - monocasa 6y ago
      It's way more of a pain, due to a lot of legacy constraints in windows. It's easy to overflow pathnames and command lines that then get silently truncated. Doing ML dev work is for sure easier on a Linux env than a pure Windows env. it's not impossible on Windows, but def much nicer in Linux.
- wvenable 6y ago
  Except your ML project is accessing the DirectX API through another cross-platform API layer (CUDA). And the purpose of running WSL is that you ultimately hope to deploy to Linux servers (which Microsoft hopes will be on Azure).
wvenable 6y ago
The thing with WSL is that it doesn't win back the ML segment from Linux to Windows for production workloads. This is just a developer workstation friendly move that explicitly doesn't tie you to Windows itself. It seems like Microsoft is continuing to see Linux as a production server target while positioning Windows to remain relevant as a workstation OS. Ostensibly, this is a move to compete with Mac OS and not Linux.
- rymate1234 6y ago
  I'm not too sure about that, what about the support for DX12 in WSL? Can't deploy that to production outside WSL right now as far as I'm aware, unless they add DX12 support to azure Linux vms...
  - marcoperaza 6y ago
    Given that the main use case is stuff like running machine learning tools, the only people directly targeting DX12 on WSL will probably be framework/library developers, who might want to add DX12 as one of the graphics systems they support. If that's the case, the vast majority of developers won't notice any difference other than more software supporting graphics acceleration when run in WSL (or, another way of looking at it, when Linux is running on the WSL "hardware"/"platform"). Sure, nothing stops you from targeting DX12 directly in your application code, but why would you do that? At that point, you'd just target Windows since your users would have to be running it anyway.
  - wvenable 6y ago
    > I'm not too sure about that, what about the support for DX12 in WSL? It's an implementation detail -- they're exposing the Windows graphics driver to the Linux system with the most minimal amount of translation and overhead. You could code directly to it in your Linux application code but it makes no sense to do that. You'd be literally writing a Linux application that can only run under Windows -- the smallest market ever proposed. Instead library/framework developers will add it as another target to improve performance in WSL for generic Linux applications.
- Valmar 6y ago
lostmsu 6y ago
Mentioned it in another comment, but I am not sure what stoped people from doing ML without WSL. I don't even know ML libraries, that don't work on Windows proper.

This sounds like an attempt to win back ML segment from Linux to Windows. There are three letters back in my mind that sound like screaming, but too early to tell unfortunately.

rvz 6y ago

In this case, this is the extend phase. So this is what they really mean about 'using Linux' and 'Microsoft <3 Linux'.

badRNG 6y ago

How is it too early to tell? It is an extension of the capability of WSL, giving you that sweet convenience of the DirectX API with your existing ML project. Of course, this extension makes your project incompatible with desktop Linux once adopted.

dade_ 6y ago
Not necessarily. It is not possible to access the GPU in WSL at all right now, so I need to dual boot which also means dealing with Linux desktop compatibility issues with my laptop. As long as I can use the same ML framework (without DirectX API), then this poses no compatibility issues at all. It just means I can develop & run my ML code in WSL.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Just curious, what stops your ML code from running under Windows?
  - monocasa 6y ago
    It's way more of a pain, due to a lot of legacy constraints in windows. It's easy to overflow pathnames and command lines that then get silently truncated. Doing ML dev work is for sure easier on a Linux env than a pure Windows env. it's not impossible on Windows, but def much nicer in Linux.
wvenable 6y ago
Except your ML project is accessing the DirectX API through another cross-platform API layer (CUDA). And the purpose of running WSL is that you ultimately hope to deploy to Linux servers (which Microsoft hopes will be on Azure).

wvenable 6y ago

The thing with WSL is that it doesn't win back the ML segment from Linux to Windows for production workloads. This is just a developer workstation friendly move that explicitly doesn't tie you to Windows itself. It seems like Microsoft is continuing to see Linux as a production server target while positioning Windows to remain relevant as a workstation OS. Ostensibly, this is a move to compete with Mac OS and not Linux.

rymate1234 6y ago
I'm not too sure about that, what about the support for DX12 in WSL? Can't deploy that to production outside WSL right now as far as I'm aware, unless they add DX12 support to azure Linux vms...
- marcoperaza 6y ago
  Given that the main use case is stuff like running machine learning tools, the only people directly targeting DX12 on WSL will probably be framework/library developers, who might want to add DX12 as one of the graphics systems they support. If that's the case, the vast majority of developers won't notice any difference other than more software supporting graphics acceleration when run in WSL (or, another way of looking at it, when Linux is running on the WSL "hardware"/"platform"). Sure, nothing stops you from targeting DX12 directly in your application code, but why would you do that? At that point, you'd just target Windows since your users would have to be running it anyway.
- wvenable 6y ago
  > I'm not too sure about that, what about the support for DX12 in WSL? It's an implementation detail -- they're exposing the Windows graphics driver to the Linux system with the most minimal amount of translation and overhead. You could code directly to it in your Linux application code but it makes no sense to do that. You'd be literally writing a Linux application that can only run under Windows -- the smallest market ever proposed. Instead library/framework developers will add it as another target to improve performance in WSL for generic Linux applications.
Valmar 6y ago

lostmsu 6y ago

Mentioned it in another comment, but I am not sure what stoped people from doing ML without WSL. I don't even know ML libraries, that don't work on Windows proper.