Microsoft ports DirectX to Linux (again), updates WSL kernel

Microsoft has released a new DirectX kernel driver for Linux on Kernel.org.  The updated driver reflects feedback from Microsoft’s first attempt to bring the technology to the open-source operating system.

Specifically, the driver has been re-written from scratch and organized in logical layers to help open source reviewers better understand how the driver is built, the DirectX driver code has been moved to the Hyper-V area of the Linux Kernel and the driver now fully supports virtualized graphics hardware. There is now also a fully open-source user space for the OpenCL, OpenVINO and OneAPI compute family of APIs on Intel GPU platforms, allowing developers to write GPU compute code that can work both on Linux and Windows.

Microsoft’s Principal Software Engineer Iouri Tarassov writes:

A lot of efforts went into addressing community feedback in this revised set of patches and we hope this is getting closer to what the community
would like to see.

Between the Intel compute runtime project and libdxg, we now have a fully open source implementation of our virtualized compute stack inside of WSL. We will continue to support both open source user-space API against our compute abstraction as well as closed source one (CUDA, DX12), leaving it to the API owners and partners to decide what makes the most sense for them.

Microsoft has also updated WSL in the Microsoft Store to version 0.51.0 provided which now includes kernel version 5.10.81.1 from the Microsoft Store. The update improves kernel configuration and enables some previously missing options for ARM64.  See the full changelog on GitHub here.

via Winfuture