Free user space for non-graphics drivers

Posted Jun 11, 2020 16:58 UTC (Thu) by nye (subscriber, #51576)
In reply to: Free user space for non-graphics drivers by excors
Parent article: Free user space for non-graphics drivers

> One of the major use cases seems to be CUDA (e.g. for developing and testing CUDA applications on Windows with WSL, before deploying to a Linux cloud), which is only supported on Linux by the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, so Mesa is irrelevant there. For 3D graphics, I assume there's normally some tight integration between user-mode and kernel-mode drivers, and the real kernel-mode driver (in the Windows kernel) is going to be the proprietary NVIDIA/AMD/Intel one, so you'll need the matching proprietary user-mode driver on Linux - you wouldn't be able to use Nouveau with it even if they all supported DRM.

> D3D12 support on WSL doesn't sound directly useful for applications, because WSL seems like a development platform rather than a deployment platform

The initial motivation for WSL appears to be just to turn Windows into a viable development platform (very successfully IMO), but I rather suspect that this specific feature is intended primarily for running real production workloads in Docker Linux containers on the same servers that are running Docker Windows containers, and with minimal (plausibly really could be negligible) performance impact.

I'm not certain what applications people are running in Docker Windows containers, or why you would actually want to do that, but it's definitely a thing so clearly there are some use cases out there.

Free user space for non-graphics drivers

Posted Jun 11, 2020 18:15 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> I'm not certain what applications people are running in Docker Windows containers

CI processes :) . It's really nice to have a known-clean state to start from for CI. Without the unbearable slowdown/latency VMs tend to have.