24K views · Sep 16, 2020 · 7:42:30 · 1 HN recommender · 4 mentions · discussed 2020–2022
Day one of the X.Org Developer's Conference 2020 stream, including talks on the Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver, the WSL graphics architecture, X11 and Wayland apps in WSL, and Mesa for D3D12.
Why Hacker News points people here: Linked for the Microsoft talks on WSL GUI support and how WDDM drivers map into the Linux VM.
“If you're interested in the lowlevel WDDM driver <-> VM driver mapping, seek to 1:18:01”HN comment, 2020
“If you're interested in the lowlevel WDDM driver <-> VM driver mapping, seek to 1:18:01”
Covers WDDM driver mapping, compute APIs and WSLg GUI support
The XDC 2020 video: this video If you're interested in the lowlevel WDDM driver <-> VM driver mapping, seek to 1:18:01 -- it also talks about the compute APIs like CUDA and OpenCL. If you're interested in WSLG, seek to 2:13:01 -- this is the GUI part of the story.
Talk on X11/Wayland GUI support coming to WSL2
(Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on WSL2. I’m just a huge fan and I say that as a dedicated/devout Mac user) Two things: First, GUI support is coming [1] and the team is working to support both X11 and Wayland [2]. Second, the Remote Development Extension for VS Code [3] lets you do this seamlessly. It auto-configs to work with WSL or WSL2 and can also connect to a container or remote machine or GitHub Codespaces codespace. It’s awesome and all of your files, your terminal, everything is mapped to WSL2, with all the GUI parts from Windows. It’s one of my favorite things. I’m not trying to convince people that WSL2 is the end-all be-all, even though I’m an unabashed fan, but I just want to correct the record a bit (regarding VS Code) and share that X11/Wayland GUI support is coming [1]: link [2]: this video [3]: link
“The XDC 2020 conference talk discusses the advantages of the built-in support, including fewer memory copies and lower latency.”
Discusses benefits of built-in GUI support: fewer memory copies, lower latency
A native method of running GUI applications in WSL2 is coming, I believe it'll be in GA in the Fall 2021 release: link XDC 2020 talk here: this video For Windows Insiders running preview builds, I believe some of the pieces are present but not preconfigured. The XDC 2020 conference talk discusses the advantages of the built-in support, including fewer memory copies and lower latency.
Microsoft's effort to make Linux apps run on Windows
Do they? The last time I checked news about Windows they were making big efforts to make Linux apps run[1]. And considering the state of the art of Linux GPU Drivers, maybe using Windows will be the only feasible way to actually run Linux apps. [1]: this video
