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

[Anthropos]

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.

Interesting! How?

[Terrablit]

Honestly, the RDP-RAIL, VAIL, and freerdp work they alluded to could blaze the frontier in some interesting directions. And the work being done needn't be only for RDP. Spice could maybe use it as a reference, although dev there is pretty slow.

Having a freerdp reference for integrating Wayland and virtualized apps could help in containerizing desktop applications on Linux. Even if they're only doing the Guest VM side, it's still doing the work for us.

That said, I'm glad Vetter and Airlie are pushing back on the legalities of reviewing code and the structure of a driver with multiple blobs. Airlie does a lot of vulkan work on top of the DRM stuff, and I wouldn't be surprised if he regularly has discussions involving the D3D layers. MS needs to irrevocably guarantee that new lawsuits can come of this before even considering upstreaming it.

[Xaero_Vincent]

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...

A headless VMware VM w/ SVGA2 vGPU. Virtualbox would also likely work.
The scripts are mine and are unreleased but they leverage FreeRDP's RDP Remote App support. I may release them after I create a tool that automates the creation of Windows VM application desktop shortcuts/launchers. As of now, I have to manually create and script the shortcuts by hand.

However, the RDP data stream is channeled thru a separate "host-only" network connection between the VM and host, which behaves like a direct crossover connection. RDP data isn't traveling thru my home network / router, which would cause lag but it's an option if I wanted to remote from a separate computer rather than a virtual machine.

WSL2 will basically be doing the exact same thing. It will have a virtual GPU Direct3D 12 driver 'DXGKRNL' (versus VMware's SVGA2) and use FreeRDP's Remote App implementation and a Wayland compositor to display Linux apps on the Windows desktop.

[QwertyChouskie]

A headless VMware VM w/ SVGA2 vGPU. Virtualbox would also likely work.
The scripts are mine and are unreleased but they leverage FreeRDP's RDP Remote App support. I may release them after I create a tool that automates the creation of Windows VM application desktop shortcuts/launchers. As of now, I have to manually create and script the shortcuts by hand.

However, the RDP data stream is channeled thru a separate "host-only" network connection between the VM and host, which behaves like a direct crossover connection. RDP data isn't traveling thru my home network / router, which would cause lag but it's an option if I wanted to remote from a separate computer rather than a virtual machine.

WSL2 will basically be doing the exact same thing. It will have a virtual GPU Direct3D 12 driver 'DXGKRNL' (versus VMware's SVGA2) and use FreeRDP's Remote App implementation and a Wayland compositor to display Linux apps on the Windows desktop.

Sounds cool! Ping me if you ever release it.

[Guest]

This particular reply of D. Airlie is rather interessting:

It's probably due to Oracle vs Google. And the IP-crazy nature of tech companies in general.

[Guest]

So they afraid of Vulkan THAT much?

Well yeah. It's a proper cross platform API, and so far implementations have been pretty good instead of the previous OpenGL and OpenGL ES mess.

[Guest]

I hope they move it out. BTW what are the chances I will see this driver in my system as part of my distro(Ubuntu)?
I don't want to see it.

You could just blacklist it. Anyway, given it's utterly useless for Linux distros, they'll probably explicitly disable it in their kernel config and that will be the end of that (assuming it ever gets merged).

[fuzz]

Microsoft = Azure

Fixed

[SteamPunker]

There is already an open source project that basically fits the hole that Microsoft is trying to fill here:

Virgil 3D. It's a paravirtualized GPU that provides hardware-accelerated 3D graphics in Linux guests. It already exists and has been in use for some time.

One notable feature remaining on the TODO list of that project happens to be Windows guest support.

So what are you waiting for, Microsoft? 🙂 Join forces with the Virgil 3D and virtio developers and create a GPU virtualisation driver model that works with both QEMU/KVM/Xen and Microsoft Hyper-V.

And if that takes off, VirtualBox will likely add support for it as well. Heck, they have already deprecated their Linux guest GPU driver in favor of piggybacking on the VMWare SVGA2 driver anyway.

Come on, Microsoft! Take this sensible step. Everybody will benefit from this. 👍

[rogerx]

Shrugs. Not really impressed. Sounds like the nutshell game, looks really good until you loose. Furthermore, flipping over the nutshells and finding there's no pea.

We'll know the're game, when Windows 95/98/XP is open sourced, give ReactOS something solid to work with.