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Comment by monocasa | Hacker News Reader

They've already upstreamed lots of other hyper-v paravirtualization infrastructure.

And why do you assume it only helps WSL? Doesn't this help all hyper-v setups get access to GPUs, including azure?

Probably because its a shim to use a proprietary (only distributed by MS) binary blob version of DirectX compiled for Linux. Outside of ML utilizing DirectX in WSL on Windows, the only group that this helps is MS.

FTR, I'm not arguing whether or not this should be upstreamed. I just see where the other poster could be coming from. I could be wrong on my take and if so, someone please correct me.

They also ported OpenCL and OpenGL to it via Mesa. Vulkan is in the works, and you can use CUDA if the host GPU supports it.

Would y'all be so worked up about VMWare upstreaming their virtual GPU bridge?

Depends. If VMWare had the history Microsoft had one would be naive not to get "so worked up".

VMWare is probably the company with the worse reputation than Microsoft since they spent more than a decade shipping large part of Linux linked against their proprietary hypervisor in a blatant GPL violation.

And yet here's where their paravirtualized GPU driver lives https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...

Microsoft has a history of anti-competitive practices that crippled the industry. In either case, serious objections are justified and severe handling of one case doesn't invalidate the handling of the other.

There's been Microsoft levels of anticompetitive practices from every proprietary hypervisor vendor. The others are seen as "oh, look! They're working with Linux! yay!" for a code dump across the wall (like vmware, and arguably z/VM), whereas here Microsoft appears to be doing everything right and working with upstream to modify a minimal MVP and are being lambasted for it.

It feels like they're doing everything right and everything we've asked for, for decades, and being shunned for it. What's the mechanism here for Linux winning and Microsoft being allowed into the community and what should they be doing different?

They're not doing everything right. They're doing something objectionable, like other people are also doing. Except they're being called out for it because of their reputation of having one of the most hostile anti-competitive practices the industry has ever seen. It's the price you pay for having such bad credit, even if your intentions initially seem benevolent.

> They're not doing everything right. They're doing something objectionable

What exactly? The only performant way to expose GPUs to guests while still allowing them to be used by the host (or multiple guests) for GPUs that don't have hardware support for partitioning themselves (ie. pretty much all discrete GPUs) is to replicate the ioctl layer from the host up into the guest. Any other solution is a non starter if you care about getting the perf you'd expect from the paravirtualized GPU.

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