Microsoft Has Another Go At Their DirectX Linux Kernel Driver

guest · Mar 2, 2022

March 2, 2022

Microsoft on Tuesday posted a third iteration of their "DXGKRNL" Linux kernel driver for DirectX / Hyper-V compute support for use within Windows Subsystem for Linux / Windows Subsystem for Android.

This kernel driver is part of Microsoft's work for GPU acceleration within WSL and since originally being published back in 2020 has been met with resistance by upstream Linux kernel developers.
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Back in January Microsoft posted a reworked DXGKRNL driver for supporting the Hyper-V compute devices for WSL/WSA and to allow the likes of OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, OpenVINO, oneAPI, and CUDA to be accelerated. Besides the kernel patch series being "rebuilt from the ground up", opening the door a bit to it being potentially mainlined is at least the fully open-source Intel Compute Runtime stack can work atop the DXGKRNL stack.

Initially only closed-source user-space drivers were available while at least now there is an "open-source" user-space driver available to address what otherwise would be a blocker for mainline inclusion. Microsoft also has the open-source libdxg library as an interface to their compute device abstraction.
The patch series cover letter notes,

"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."
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The updated Microsoft DXGKRNL patch series can be found on the kernel mailing list. So far Greg Kroah-Hartman has commented on the new patches with a number of technical issues to address while we wait to see if this Microsoft kernel driver stands chances in 2022 for making its way to the mainline kernel for something just benefiting Windows Subsystem for Linux / Windows Subsystem for Android atop Microsoft Windows hosts.

Just counting the DXKGRNL portion and not any user-space work, the kernel driver is 16.8k lines of new code.
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Microsoft Has Another Go At Their DirectX Linux Kernel Driver

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Microsoft Has Another Go At Their DirectX Linux Kernel Driver

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