8 ms·

Note how they don’t contribute anything to X/Wayland, they only _extend_ it so that DX12 and other proprietary, Windows-only systems can interact with Linux. Th

Note how they don’t contribute anything to X/Wayland, they only _extend_ it so that DX12 and other proprietary, Windows-only systems can interact with Linux. These are anti-features. Like they could also just use Vulkan and be done with, but they don’t; EEE is in full swing.

simion314 6y ago
Could someone use this to improve the DirectX on Wine compatibility? I know that the DXVK reached a state where most of things work but some games will need special patches. a fix for one game will break other game.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  No. The extensions require DirectX running on the Hyper-V host to call into. It's a virtual syscall, not an in-WSL implementation. See: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/
robert_foss 6y ago
Thats not entirely true. They have been contributing to the Clover OpenCL implementation in Mesa, and added RDP shell to the Weston wayland compositor for example. That being said, just using the established standards instead of jumping through hoops to support their own standards on the linux platform would be nicer.
coldtea 6y ago
EEE? What is this, 1998? Also, why should "just use Vulkan and be done with"? Vulkan is just another standard, being open doesn't mean it's better, or more suited to their needs (they have a platform to consider, they're not about cross-platformness).
- geofft 6y ago
  Yeah, if "embrace, extend, extinguish" has been going for the past 22 years and they're still busy embracing and occasionally extending and haven't figured out how to extinguish, I see no reason to discourage them :)
  - teruakohatu 6y ago
    You forget they set the web browser market back a decade, and in doing so held back Linux desktop adoption. It was not that long ago that some important websites, such as bank or government, required IE. Microsoft embraced the browser market, extended it (activex along with some genuine innovatives such as ajax) and then extinguished it by letting IE languish. The technological progress recovered thanks to efforts by Mozilla, KDE, Google and Apple, but who knows how our world might have looked like if Microsoft had not been successful in EEE'ing the web.
    - oblio 6y ago
      > Mozilla Agreed. > KDE. Agreed. > Google and Apple. Out of the frying pan and into the fire :-)
    - majkinetor 6y ago
      Its not much better now - they require Chrome.
  - jevgeni 6y ago
    So, they've been adopting open source tech, is what you are saying?
- robert_foss 6y ago
  It is still 1998 in that sense. Direct3D, DirectML & DirectCompute are all built as moats for Microsoft. Just like the Apple Metal API is.
  - pierrebai 6y ago
    How dare they design API to suit their need? That a company wants its own API to move freely and faster is often described as evil when it is merely sensible for them. It used to cause lock-in, but nowadays there are enough tech stack that isolate you from the underlying API to make it irrelevant. Do note that until, oh let's arbitrarily say 10 years ago, DirectX was ahead feature-wise to OpenGL and OpenGL was moving at turtle pace.
    - robert_foss 6y ago
      They can do whatever they want, of course. But don't kid yourself about the reasons. If features are what they need, Khronos accepts any company as a member.
      - coldtea 6y ago
        >They can do whatever they want, of course. But don't kid yourself about the reasons. Isn't the people kidding themselves that ones that consider it a "strange" or "troubling" reason that a company has a product and wants to sell that product?
  - coldtea 6y ago
    A platform has APIs. Who said an OS should use "open" graphics APIs? The whole point of having an OS is that it's different than another OS. If all OSes just used the same APIs (filesystems, graphics, sound, etc) we'd just have one OS. That's something shared by unices and Linux follows course, but it's not the idea behind (or the ideal of) other OSes. And I don't want a world where there's a single set of APIs for all OSes, and all OSes give the same core functionality in the same implementation (e.g. Vulcan + OpenAL + POSIX + ...). Having all OSes be that (e.g. all use Vulcan), would be the same situation as everybody using DirectX (innovation wise), the only exception being that Vulcan is free/open. But I don't want openess about all, I also want variety and different innovations, and platforms offering unique stuff...
gmueckl 6y ago
Taking a guess, this seems mostly like a plan to get machine learning developers back onto Windows as main development boxes. If so, the first iteration of WSL itself was about web development. The integration of cross compilation and remote debugging for Linux into Visual Studio points into a similar direction. MS seems to accept Linux on servers, but allowing Linux on desktop machines might actually end up eating a significant chunk of the Windows market share.
- noahl 6y ago
  I think Microsoft's strategy (I work there, but I don't have any special knowledge of this) is to be the best possible platform for development in general, not just machine learning. That's why they bought GitHub, and it's also why they have WSL, remote debugging on Linux, etc. I expect they will go wherever they think developers want to be to achieve that goal. I can see this hurting traditional Linux graphics systems and development tooling, but I think the main dynamic driving this is not proprietary-vs-open, it's Microsoft's ability to coordinate large numbers of developers, because they have a massively more united org than random hobbyists. If you combined all of the efforts of all of the people working on Linux tools for the past 20 years and got them working on the same thing, it would probably be an amazing stack, and Microsoft would probably just support it. Instead, the open source efforts have been scattered among a lot of different ideas, which means there hasn't been a single windowing toolkit, IDE, or whatever for people to rally around and all contribute to. And as a result, Microsoft can show up, get a few hundred people pulling in the same direction, and have the market-leading product not through any dirty tricks, but just by putting in more coordinated effort than anyone else.
  - brnt 6y ago
    I know what you're saying but I still wanted to opine that I find Linux distros amazing stacks! The best stack I know off at least.
  - xorcist 6y ago
    > the main dynamic driving this is not proprietary-vs-open, Some would say that's the whole point. Not which company wins, not even which standard wins, but that openness wins. Of course the fragmentation strategy can be successful against such a push. It's bascially the oldest trick in the book. That doesn't mean it will win in the long run.
II2II 6y ago
These may be anti-features, but it is good in a couple of respects. One is the acknowledgement by Microsoft of the role of open source software in the industry, and the other is to facilitate the development of software in mixed environments. I seriously doubt this poses a serious risk to open source software. Open source developers are not going to be any more likely to adopt closed components, particularly from a company that has bred animosity towards open source in the past.
uluyol 6y ago
They are building an OpenGL-to-DX12 stack using mesa, the open source OpenGL implementation. As Microsoft finds bugs or compatibility issues with GL apps (since many rely on behavior specific to the Nvidia driver), I'm sure they'll contribute fixes to upstream mesa.
Jasper_ 6y ago
That is not true. They've been working on a new OpenCL compiler. You can see commits from Jesse Natalie in here, they're one of the D3D12 engineers at MS working on mesa and contributing code. This is fully free-standing and is not related to hypervisor support at all. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/kusma/mesa/-/commits/msclc-d3d12/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/kusma/mesa/-/commits/msclc-d3...

simion314 6y ago

Could someone use this to improve the DirectX on Wine compatibility? I know that the DXVK reached a state where most of things work but some games will need special patches. a fix for one game will break other game.

freeone3000 6y ago
No. The extensions require DirectX running on the Hyper-V host to call into. It's a virtual syscall, not an in-WSL implementation. See: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/

robert_foss 6y ago

Thats not entirely true. They have been contributing to the Clover OpenCL implementation in Mesa, and added RDP shell to the Weston wayland compositor for example. That being said, just using the established standards instead of jumping through hoops to support their own standards on the linux platform would be nicer.

coldtea 6y ago

EEE? What is this, 1998? Also, why should "just use Vulkan and be done with"? Vulkan is just another standard, being open doesn't mean it's better, or more suited to their needs (they have a platform to consider, they're not about cross-platformness).

geofft 6y ago
Yeah, if "embrace, extend, extinguish" has been going for the past 22 years and they're still busy embracing and occasionally extending and haven't figured out how to extinguish, I see no reason to discourage them :)
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  You forget they set the web browser market back a decade, and in doing so held back Linux desktop adoption. It was not that long ago that some important websites, such as bank or government, required IE. Microsoft embraced the browser market, extended it (activex along with some genuine innovatives such as ajax) and then extinguished it by letting IE languish. The technological progress recovered thanks to efforts by Mozilla, KDE, Google and Apple, but who knows how our world might have looked like if Microsoft had not been successful in EEE'ing the web.
  - oblio 6y ago
    > Mozilla Agreed. > KDE. Agreed. > Google and Apple. Out of the frying pan and into the fire :-)
  - majkinetor 6y ago
    Its not much better now - they require Chrome.
- jevgeni 6y ago
  So, they've been adopting open source tech, is what you are saying?
robert_foss 6y ago
It is still 1998 in that sense. Direct3D, DirectML & DirectCompute are all built as moats for Microsoft. Just like the Apple Metal API is.
- pierrebai 6y ago
  How dare they design API to suit their need? That a company wants its own API to move freely and faster is often described as evil when it is merely sensible for them. It used to cause lock-in, but nowadays there are enough tech stack that isolate you from the underlying API to make it irrelevant. Do note that until, oh let's arbitrarily say 10 years ago, DirectX was ahead feature-wise to OpenGL and OpenGL was moving at turtle pace.
  - robert_foss 6y ago
    They can do whatever they want, of course. But don't kid yourself about the reasons. If features are what they need, Khronos accepts any company as a member.
    - coldtea 6y ago
      >They can do whatever they want, of course. But don't kid yourself about the reasons. Isn't the people kidding themselves that ones that consider it a "strange" or "troubling" reason that a company has a product and wants to sell that product?
- coldtea 6y ago
  A platform has APIs. Who said an OS should use "open" graphics APIs? The whole point of having an OS is that it's different than another OS. If all OSes just used the same APIs (filesystems, graphics, sound, etc) we'd just have one OS. That's something shared by unices and Linux follows course, but it's not the idea behind (or the ideal of) other OSes. And I don't want a world where there's a single set of APIs for all OSes, and all OSes give the same core functionality in the same implementation (e.g. Vulcan + OpenAL + POSIX + ...). Having all OSes be that (e.g. all use Vulcan), would be the same situation as everybody using DirectX (innovation wise), the only exception being that Vulcan is free/open. But I don't want openess about all, I also want variety and different innovations, and platforms offering unique stuff...

gmueckl 6y ago

Taking a guess, this seems mostly like a plan to get machine learning developers back onto Windows as main development boxes. If so, the first iteration of WSL itself was about web development. The integration of cross compilation and remote debugging for Linux into Visual Studio points into a similar direction. MS seems to accept Linux on servers, but allowing Linux on desktop machines might actually end up eating a significant chunk of the Windows market share.

noahl 6y ago
I think Microsoft's strategy (I work there, but I don't have any special knowledge of this) is to be the best possible platform for development in general, not just machine learning. That's why they bought GitHub, and it's also why they have WSL, remote debugging on Linux, etc. I expect they will go wherever they think developers want to be to achieve that goal. I can see this hurting traditional Linux graphics systems and development tooling, but I think the main dynamic driving this is not proprietary-vs-open, it's Microsoft's ability to coordinate large numbers of developers, because they have a massively more united org than random hobbyists. If you combined all of the efforts of all of the people working on Linux tools for the past 20 years and got them working on the same thing, it would probably be an amazing stack, and Microsoft would probably just support it. Instead, the open source efforts have been scattered among a lot of different ideas, which means there hasn't been a single windowing toolkit, IDE, or whatever for people to rally around and all contribute to. And as a result, Microsoft can show up, get a few hundred people pulling in the same direction, and have the market-leading product not through any dirty tricks, but just by putting in more coordinated effort than anyone else.
- brnt 6y ago
  I know what you're saying but I still wanted to opine that I find Linux distros amazing stacks! The best stack I know off at least.
- xorcist 6y ago
  > the main dynamic driving this is not proprietary-vs-open, Some would say that's the whole point. Not which company wins, not even which standard wins, but that openness wins. Of course the fragmentation strategy can be successful against such a push. It's bascially the oldest trick in the book. That doesn't mean it will win in the long run.

II2II 6y ago

These may be anti-features, but it is good in a couple of respects. One is the acknowledgement by Microsoft of the role of open source software in the industry, and the other is to facilitate the development of software in mixed environments. I seriously doubt this poses a serious risk to open source software. Open source developers are not going to be any more likely to adopt closed components, particularly from a company that has bred animosity towards open source in the past.

uluyol 6y ago

They are building an OpenGL-to-DX12 stack using mesa, the open source OpenGL implementation. As Microsoft finds bugs or compatibility issues with GL apps (since many rely on behavior specific to the Nvidia driver), I'm sure they'll contribute fixes to upstream mesa.

Jasper_ 6y ago

That is not true. They've been working on a new OpenCL compiler. You can see commits from Jesse Natalie in here, they're one of the D3D12 engineers at MS working on mesa and contributing code. This is fully free-standing and is not related to hypervisor support at all. https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/kusma/mesa/-/commits/msclc-d3d12/ https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/kusma/mesa/-/commits/msclc-d3...