Mainlining The Microsoft DirectX Kernel Driver For Linux Will Be An Uphill Battle

[JPFSanders]

MS still gets a considerable amount from licesing Windows. It is mostly from Enterprise and Pc venders paying that, not consumers, so it doesn't feel like that much, but it is server Billion dollars yearly.

Considerable is a funny way to describe a supply of infinite money.

Windows is the cornerstone of the MS empire. The pillar where everything else rests.

You have no idea the power MS wields in the industry.

[dragorth]

Considerable is a funny way to describe a supply of infinite money.

Windows is the cornerstone of the MS empire. The pillar where everything else rests.

You have no idea the power MS wields in the industry.

I was specifically replying to dkasak's comment.

[Sonadow]

It's a screenshot of my system made just minutes ago and I've posted similar ones before. Arch Linux bare metal and Windows 10 headless VM with integration scripts to make apps appear on the GNOME desktop. This is just to point out that Linux bare-metal users can have an equally seamless hybrid configuration like WSL 2, so that Microsoft doesn't get to steal all the thunder.

In reality this isn't all that useful for me and mainly a novelty (so I only use it sometimes for specific apps broke in Wine) but I suppose it would be a decent solution for someone who needed to use Microsoft Office 2019 or Quickbooks that run poorly in Wine but prefers Linux.

And many people in this forum have been asking you these questions multiple times on how you achieved it:

1. What VM solution are you using? KVM? VirtualBox?
2. What scripts do you use for headless integration and where can they be found?

Which you have never answered...

[RussianNeuroMancer]

This quote from that thread is very interesting.

So they afraid of Vulkan THAT much?

[siyia]

We shouldn't contaminate Linux with this crap.

[m132]

Somebody's suffering from nasty attention deficit, eh?

QwertyChouskie uskie arcivanov nov Sonadow I'm pretty sure that's FreeRDP's RAIL

[Snaipersky]

If they want to be useful, implement gallium over dx12. Opengl, GLES, and openCL will come as a result. This will enable Nvidia compatibility, as their Windows userspace driver implements DX12. Gallium state trackers for dx10 &11 can then be developed, providing a complete cross platform suite of stateful graphics APIs.

[dragorth]

If they want to be useful, implement gallium over dx12. Opengl, GLES, and openCL will come as a result. This will enable Nvidia compatibility, as their Windows userspace driver implements DX12. Gallium state trackers for dx10 &11 can then be developed, providing a complete cross platform suite of stateful graphics APIs.

They are using Mesa for OpenGL and OpenCL support, but it is going over their DX12 Translation project they have already open soured.

[torsionbar28]

They are going to do it eventually. Trust me. I have been saying this for years and people don't believe it because they are fixed on the past. Microsoft is getting its money elsewhere these days. Windows are costly to develop and maintain and the profits aren't that important anymore. And there is nothing preventing them from re-basing their Windows on GNU/Linux while still retaining their own compatibility with past Windows libs,drivers and apps. Doesn't really matter if their stuff get mainlined or not.

I think so too. Windows was a good cash-cow and method of vendor lock-in in the past, but these days ... not so much. The cost of maintaining and adding to Windows must be incredible, and there have been some high profile QA issues cropping up pretty regularly with updates. If they could manage to drag direct x and windows apps compatibility to a linux OS base, while keeping parts commercial, that would make a lot of sense for them.

Nope. Not now, not ever. Microsoft = Windows. Everything they do revolves around Windows and that hasn't changed one bit. The only money Microsoft gets "elsewhere" is from other products and services that support Windows and provide vendor lock-in to Windows. Products and services like AD, Office, Exchange, Sharepoint, Microsoft Store, etc. Proprietary formats and protocols they leverage for vendor lock-in, like NTFS, MS Office documents, network protocols for AD/Exchange/etc. Take away the Windows OS and the rest loses all purpose.

And even if they did swap out the Windows OS underpinnings for a Linux kernel (which they will never do) that is not something we should be cheering for. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

[L_A_G]

If the idea is to bring OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL and CUDA to WSL doing that trough a DX12 translation layer like this is just stupidly over-complex when the Windows host can just run all of those natively the same way Wine handles OpenGL and Vulkan. The only two situations where it makes any kind of sense for Microsoft to do this that I can come up with revolve around stupidity at Microsoft's upper management. Either that someone who's badly out of touch in upper management came in and ordered that they had to shoehorn DirectX into the planned GUI application support the same way Wine and DXVK/Proton support Direct3D or someone really stupid and greedy in management thought they'd be able to bifurcate the market to their advantage "Embrace - Extend - Extinguish"-style with this.

Either way I hope this is a miserable failure on the level of Microsoft BoB or the Zune.