Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) to get DirectX 12 and GUI support

Big Linux announcements from Microsoft were made at the company's digital-only Build 2020 event. An overview can be found at the Microsoft DirectX blog. The software giant revealed that its Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2), which is part of the Windows 10 May 2020 Update, will receive support for GPU acceleration. The company is working on client GPU virtualization technology and will bring DirectX 12 as well as support for various machine learning APIs (like NVIDIA CUDA) to WSL. Additionally, it will soon also be possible to run a Linux IDE or other GUI application. At the moment, WSL is a console-only experience.

What is WSL? WSL is an environment in which users can run their Linux applications from the comfort of their Windows PC. If you are a developer working on containerized workload that will be deployed in the cloud inside of Linux containers, you can develop and test these workloads locally on your Windows PC using the same native Linux tools you are accustomed to. In response to popular demand, these Linux applications and tools can now benefit from GPU acceleration.

Phoronix writes Microsoft is also considering to bring DirectX 12 to Linux outside the WSL2 scope. Here's a quote from Microsoft engineer Steve Pronovost:

We have consider the possibility of bringing DX to Linux with no Windows cord attached. I'm not ready to discuss this at this time... but in the hypothetical that we were do this, DX would be running on top of DRI/DRM on native Linux. We likely would be contributing some changes to DRM to address area of divergence and get better mapping for our user mode driver, but we wouldn't try to shoehorn /dev/dxg into the picture. In that hypothetical world, we would essentially have DX target DRM on native Linux and DX continue to target DXG in WSL to share the GPU with the host.