Well, here’s an unexpected surprise… A new version of the Linux kernel patches for DXGKRNL were posted today for that DirectX kernel driver that began a few years ago for supporting Windows Subsystem For Linux (WSL) use-cases. This comes four years to the month after the prior version was posted and without much excitement for getting it into the mainline Linux kernel.
DXGKRNL was developed by Microsoft as the kernel driver for DirectX graphics adapters to expose to Linux for WSL2 usage. Right from the start there was little appetite for getting this Microsoft driver upstreamed into the Linux kernel especially with the only benefit being closed-source usage within the Microsoft Windows host confines.
Back in 2022 they reworked their DXGKRNL driver and back in March 2022 was their v3 driver patches. Hitting the Linux kernel mailing list today is now the fourth iteration of the patches.
With the v4 patches, there is now support for compute-only adapter. The compute-only adapter support will be useful for AI / machine learning accelerators within the WSL2 world. There is also DMA fence / sync file integration, new Direct3D functions exposed, pin-user-pages for DMA-accessible memory, and synchronization and memory fixes. Plus various code clean-ups, bug fixes, and other changes.
The Microsoft DXGKRNL v4 patches are now out for review on the Linux kernel mailing list while waiting to see what the upstream Linux kernel stakeholders think of this latest patch activity.
