Microsoft Lands VA-API To Direct3D 12 H.264 Video Encode/Decode In Mesa

[user1]

Embrace, expand, extinguish. Currently they are at the embrace/expand phase. Why use Linux natively when you can use everything atop of Windows, with probably a better experience?

I still don't understand why would anyone want run graphical stuff in WSL when they can just run it natively on Windows? Or are there graphical apps that are available for Linux but not for Windows?

[FireBurn]

Can any of this be compiled on WSL yet? All my attempts for Dozen proved fruitless

[oleid]

Gotta try it out. If WSL2 pans out to be everything promised I could just run all the cross platform software through it instead of installing Windows versions of the software.

Yeah, but you'd need to use Windows. Last time I tried Windows 10 on my machine it was slow as hell. And Windows 11 is even more spyware than WIndows 10 already is.
So thanks, but no thanks. It might be an option at work (thankfully we are on Debian11), but at home? No waaay

[luno]

I still don't understand why would anyone want run graphical stuff in WSL when they can just run it natively on Windows? Or are there graphical apps that are available for Linux but not for Windows?

have you tried running Emacs in native Windows, it is super slow, have to configure of lot of things to get little things like spellchecker (last time i have to compile nuspell). another is tmux and mosh supported Applications will not work native Windows, also many properietry industry tools are linux only (as building tools where you have kernel souce is easier than fighting Microsoft team for small features). NTFS file performance is slow as hell, no idea when ReFS will come to Windows Desktop.

[luno]

Embrace, expand, extinguish. Currently they are at the embrace/expand phase. Why use Linux natively when you can use everything atop of Windows, with probably a better experience?

or reverse uno will happen, people will realize developing on Linux is easier and File System is faster and remove middleman, also many people will just tools for WSL rather than for Windows (GUI situation is pretty bad in Windows too), which will promote Gtk, Qt and Flutter apps development

[arQon]

Does anyone know why does Microsoft put so much effort in all the gui/graphics stuff for WSL? I thought the main point of WSL is simply to have a Unix environment for development purposes.

You thought wrong, which is also a large part of the answer to your question.

As more and more software becomes a thin(-ish) client to "the cloud", Windows itself becomes less relevant to anyone but gamers [1] and businesses, and on the business side of things it's more about AD, Exchange, Sharepoint, etc than it is about the client. VMs have been a viable way to do *most* cross-platform development for a decade now, but "cross-platform" is *never* equal [2] - someone is always the "most favored nation", and MS very much wants that to be Windows, always. It doesn't matter that Windows doesn't make money, but it *does* matter that people don't move away from it.

The "standard" arrangement for those cross-platform developers is a Windows host running Linux VMs, for a list of reasons that was once very long but has been getting quite a lot shorter over the past few years, and the biggest item on it these days isn't even something MS owns. Linux VMs in Windows don't bother MS at all, because it means Windows remains the main target. Windows VMs in Linux though, is a much less pleasant concept, for the same reason. You *really* don't want that switch to happen.
Since all your docs are now in O352 anyway though, and mail isn't exactly performance-demanding, all of the "business" side of the job is pretty much ideally *suited* to be running in a VM, other than possibly whatever videoconferencing system you have: all of which run either exclusively or massively better on Wx.

So, here are your options:

1) Run Wx bare-metal - installed and maintained by IT, guaranteed to work with 100% of company devices, the "biometric-logins-only" asshattery that some idiot manager heard about over a very nice round of lunches and golf games, etc etc - and use a Linux VM. And even the "Linux VM" part of that is handled by MS. How easy can you get? This is great!

2) Run Linux bare-metal - installed and maintained by, most probably, the dev team (or whatever this week's flavor is: DevOpsHelpdeskJanitorial by now, I expect :P) that gets paid very large amounts of money to, well, NOT do that. Discover that the standard wifi card doesn't work in Linux, and nor does face/print login, etc etc - and run a Wx VM. Using a hypervisor which you'll potentially have to buy from your own (dept) budget, learn, and then manage the subscriptions, updates, rollout, and etc of yourself. Sounds... much less fun. Oh, and desktop performance in the VM will suck, and a lot of things either won't be available at all or be too broken to use.

Today is about adding another very heavy anchor to (2). Because now, those L-on-W cases are just as good at video as any linux desktop, but the obverse is very much not true. D3D support followed a very similar train of thought. So the business stays on W Servers, and the devs stay on W desktops - just as if it was *only* a Windows shop - and W remains the most favored platform.


[1] Cue the inevitable cries of Proton fanboys shouting that the five games they own "mostly work" in Proton under certain conditions, and therefore it's perfect and nobody needs Windows for games any more, because no other games exist. Bonus points for the first one to say "xyz runs *better* in WINE because LiNuX sUpeRoIriTTy..."

[2] I refrained from bringing this up a few days ago when Danny was grinding his Firefox/VAAPI axe in a different thread (and he's absolutely right to do so), but that's the perfect example. Mozilla took over *ten years* to deliver HW video support at all on Linux, and then broke it more than *6 months ago*less than 3 months later. IOW, it's already been broken for longer than it *ever* worked, and still counting.
How long do you think it would have taken them to fix it if that had been the Windows version instead?
It's a trick question, because the Windows build would *never* have been allowed to ship in such a catastrophically broken state in the first place. The commit that broke it would have been reverted *immediately* when it was discovered: it wouldn't have survived into even a second Nightly build, let alone an actual release. But Linux? "Yeah, fuck those guys, who cares?".

[aufkrawall]

Does anyone know why does Microsoft put so much effort in all the gui/graphics stuff for WSL? I thought the main point of WSL is simply to have a Unix environment for development purposes.

I think it's the industry's general trend to blur the lines between platforms.

[Danny3]

Step 1: Type about:config
Step 2: type va
step 3: force enable va-api

Doesn't work!

I already have a user.js file with all the about:configs options and it was working great until version 97, since version 98 it doesn't work anymore.
See this bug:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1751363

Now requires the sandbox to be disabled, but I don't want to do that as I didn't have to do that before and it was working fine.

[Eirikr1848]

thats a good way to make a browser completely unusable for some people, myself included, needed to nuke the browser to fix

Really? Using which GPU? I’ve been screwing around with that on Arch and Arch32 even back to a 965GM (with no va-api) and everything was wonderful.

The issues came about when messing with gfx.___ settings and force enabling like… everything.

[Quackdoc]

Really? Using which GPU? I’ve been screwing around with that on Arch and Arch32 even back to a 965GM (with no va-api) and everything was wonderful.

The issues came about when messing with gfx.___ settings and force enabling like… everything.

rx 580 4g, I also tested on a n3050 crocus driver but that was when the now fixed bug of no libva was a thing