Microsoft News Archives

In addition to Microsoft enabling OpenGL 4.6 over Direct3D 12 via Mesa, Microsoft engineers have also been working on some video improvements within the Mesa code-base.

With Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) continuing to prove popular mot only for end-users and independent developers but within organizations as well for having easy access to a Linux environment from the confines of Windows 11, Microsoft has added new enterprise-focused security options for WSL.

It was just last week that Microsoft got OpenGL 4.3 implemented over Direct3D 12 for use in cases where Windows lacks a native OpenGL driver or for use under Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSLg). After implementing a few more GL extensions atop D3D12, Microsoft has now got OpenGL 4.4 in Mesa running on Direct3D.

Microsoft yesterday published CBL-Mariner 2.0.20231106 as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of services from Azure to WSL.

Microsoft has published a big feature update to Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" for running Linux binaries within the confines of Windows 11.

While Microsoft is known for their own set of security issues on Windows and related software, Microsoft on Patch Tuesday ended up releasing CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230904 as their open-source Linux distribution that with this update is primarily driven by security fixes.

Microsoft has released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230805 as the newest monthly-ish update to their in-house Linux distribution used for purposes from Azure to WSL.

Microsoft has released an updated version of its CBL-Mariner 2.0 in-house Linux distribution that includes various security patches, new packages being added to the OS, and a variety of other updates.

CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230630 is now shipping as Microsoft's newest in-house Linux distribution release.

Microsoft's latest contribution to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack is enhancing their Direct3D 12 driver to support AV1 video encoding with the VA-API interface.

Microsoft's CBL-Mariner team has published v2.0.20230609 as the newest update to their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes inside and outside the Redmond company.

Microsoft has published the latest release of their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) implementation for running Linux distributions within the confines of Windows. With the WSL 1.3.10 update there is now experimental memory reclaim support and other changes.

For Linux gamers relying on Microsoft Xbox controllers, the upcoming Linux 6.5 kernel will enable rumble support for several newer controller models.

In addition to Microsoft's Build 2023 conference this week where they announced expanded archive/compression format support, Windows Terminal improvements, more AI tech, and other initiatives, they also happened to release CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230518 as the newest version of their in-house Linux distribution.

While the Vulkan high performance graphics and compute API is backed by many vendors, Microsoft and Apple are two notable organizations that haven't backed this Khronos Group standard. For Microsoft's part, they obviously prefer their in-house Direct3D. However, Microsoft is making preparations for submitting their first Vulkan extension.

In addition to Microsoft having a significant present at last week's Linux Security Summit, there were also multiple Microsoft engineers at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit that was also taking place in Vancouver. Among the Microsoft Linux talks this week was a presentation on the Linux kernel usage by WSL2 -- including how it's moving closer to a mainline/upstream status and also mentions of Linux kernel features loved by Microsoft's engineering team.

While many Linux distributions look at Btrfs or F2FS when evaluating new root file-system options or even something like OpenZFS, in the case of Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution only this month have they even gotten to supporting XFS as a root file-system option.

For those making use of Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization there are some notable additions to find with the in-development Linux 6.4 kernel.

Microsoft has published its latest CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230407 Linux distribution images this weekend as their in-house open-source OS that is used for a variety of purposes, mostly around Azure infrastructure.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution that they make public, CBL-Mariner, began with a very niche focus while over time has continued adding additional packages as it is worked into becoming a more robust Linux platform.

Last year I wrote about a Google engineer working on rumble support for the latest Microsoft controllers in conjunction with Microsoft's Xbox team. That patch seemed to have fallen through the woodwork but has been updated and sent out in "v2" form this week for allowing Linux gamers to enjoy rumble functionality with these latest Microsoft controllers.

Microsoft engineers continue to work heavily on enhancing the Linux support for Hyper-V considering that in the Azure public cloud at last report was more than 50% of their VMs running Linux. Microsoft has continued implementing more Hyper-V features within the Linux kernel and their latest is working on Virtual Trust Level (VTL) integration as part of Virtual Secure Mode (VSM) handling.

Microsoft's in-house Linux distribution CBL-Mariner has been public now for about two years. CBL-Mariner has been in use for Microsoft's use-cases from their Azure cloud to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) while their newest release continues a recent trend of pointing towards a high performance computing (HPC) workloads focus too.

Microsoft on Tuesday released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230208 as the latest version of their in-house public Linux distribution that serves a variety of purposes from the cloud down to the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

For over a year I have been writing about how Microsoft has been working on Direct3D video acceleration for Mesa, getting VA-API mapped atop Direct3D 12 video APIs, video engine based effects, and other enablement around Direct3D 12 video support. Microsoft has today officially released the Direct3D 12 GPU video acceleration support now for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users.

Microsoft on Friday released version 1.14 of their ONNX Runtime, a cross-platform, high performance machine learning inferencing and training accelerator.

Microsoft on Wednesday released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230126-2.0 as the newest version of this in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of use-cases from within Azure infrastructure over to WSL purposes.

Microsoft engineers seem to be working on getting the Dozen "dzn" Mesa driver up to speed as quickly as possible. It was just earlier this month it began passing nearly all Vulkan 1.0 conformance tests, Vulkan 1.1 was then exposed just a few days ago, and now Dzn is ironing out Vulkan 1.2.

After Microsoft engineers got Vulkan 1.0 conformance tests to nearly 100% for their Dozen "Dzn" Mesa driver, they have now enabled Vulkan 1.1 support as their next step for this Vulkan-atop-Direct3D 12 open-source implementation.

It's easy to forget that Microsoft maintains a command-line package manager for Windows... The open-source WinGet package manager is approaching three years since its announcement while it continues to not be as rich and robust of what Linux users for many years have enjoyed, but in any case it's continuing to be improved.

Microsoft's Dozen "Dzn" code within Mesa is a Vulkan implementation built atop Direct3D 12 for enjoying this modern industry-standard graphics/compute API atop Microsoft's D3D12 API, should the system lack an underlying native Vulkan driver or in cases like using Windows Subsystem for Linux. Dozen is now above 99% for its conformance pass rate for Vulkan 1.0 and more of Vulkan 1.1 is now being worked on by Microsoft's engineers that contribute the open-source code to Mesa.

Microsoft's Dozen "dzn", which was merged to Mesa last year as Vulkan implemented on Direct3D 12, is onto a 98.5% pass rate for its Vulkan 1.0 coverage.

Microsoft released CBL-Mariner 2.0.20221222 on Tuesday as their first update of 2023 for their in-house Linux distribution that is used for a variety of purposes within the company from Azure to other behind-the-scenes Linux OS use.

In early 2017 Microsoft open-sourced their DirectX shader compiler and shortly thereafter it's been possible to build it on Linux while finally as of this week Microsoft has begun providing official Linux binaries of their shader compiler.

While the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has been around for six years now and with WSL2 is on to running graphical Linux apps with GPU acceleration and a wide array of capabilities, including the ability to run systemd and the like, only today has Microsoft promoted WSL to "general availability" status on Windows 10 and Windows 11.

Microsoft on Tuesday released .NET 7 with improved Linux support, better performance, and many new features throughout this Microsoft platform stack.

Microsoft has issued a big update to their in-house Linux distribution, CBL-Mariner, with a few new packages introduced as well as various updates to existing packages and other OS modifications.

The latest patches from Microsoft for the Linux kernel are for extending the kernel's support to allow running on a nested Microsoft (MSHV) hypervisor.

Windows users are increasingly making use of Mesa with Microsoft investing in supporting a number of different open, industry standard APIs and then layering them atop the underlying Direct3D 12 driver for the likes of WSL2 usage. OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and VA-API video acceleration have been the primary targets for Microsoft engineers working on Mesa with the Windows Subsystem for Linux in mind while also posing other possible use-cases where the host may lack native drivers for those APIs. For bettering Mesa on Windows, Microsoft has now added support for compiling against the DirectX 12 Agility SDK.

Thanks to a Google engineer in communication with Microsoft engineers, the "hid-microsoft" upstream Linux driver is seeing work to support the rumble mode on newer Xbox controllers.

As some interesting open-source news out of Microsoft today, their open-source Windows Terminal that has been in development the past few years and providing many modern features is now the default beginning with Windows 11 22H2.

Microsoft has released its monthly update to CBL-Mariner 2.0, its in-house Linux distribution serving a variety of purposes from WSL to Azure.

Microsoft engineers continue working on improving their Direct3D 12 driver within Mesa for benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) usage and similar.

Microsoft's Xbox Adaptive Controller is intended for gamers with limited mobility and is intended as a control hub to making gaming more accessible. Linux support for the Xbox Adaptive Controller is being worked on.

It was just over a year ago Microsoft lifted the lid further on CBL-Mariner as its internal Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes at the company from running within their Azure cloud environment to also finding use by WSL, and various other use-cases. They have continued issuing updates and expanding the capabilities of this enterprise-tasked Linux distribution.

Increase use of Windows BitLocker for full-disk encryption on Windows 10 and Windows 11 is causing more challenges by Linux distributions for supporting convenient dual boot functionality for those wishing to keep both Windows and Linux on the same systems.

Yesterday's surprise was that Lennart Poettering quietly had left Red Hat following a decade and a half there leading PulseAudio among other projects and ultimately going on to start systemd that has fundamentally reshaped modern Linux distributions. It turns out he had joined Microsoft and continuing his work on systemd.

The Microsoft Dozen "Dzn" code within Mesa that allows for the Vulkan API to be implemented atop Direct3D 12 for benefit on Windows now has a working pipeline cache implementation.

Last month Microsoft issued the first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0, its in-house Linux distribution used for powering services from Microsoft Azure to WSL use-cases and more. CBL-Mariner 2.0 this weekend saw a rather large monthly update with a number of fixes, package updates, and new additions to this "Common Base Linux" platform.

Last month Microsoft published their first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 as an updated version of their in-house Linux distribution used for a variety of purposes from Windows Subsystem for Linux to Azure. This week Microsoft released a rather hefty stable update to their CBL-Mariner 2.0 distribution.