The topic of Microsoft and Linux is worthy of study. Initially, Linux and Windows were bitter enemies and criticized each other. We will always remember the subtle words of Steve Ballmer calling linux cancer. Now with Satya Nadella everything has changed and far from criticizing Linux they embrace free software technology and it is used in multiple areas. The latest, they are porting certain areas of DirectX 12 to Linux.
DirectX 12 will not come to Linux, at least not in its entirety
First of all, let’s make it clear, Microsoft has no intention of offering DirectX 12 on Linux. The industry is betting heavily on open source graphics APIs like vulkan. High-performance cross-platform software like Vulkan enables exceptional performance on Doom Eternal and allows low-budget titles like Farm Simulator 22 work on Mac OS X and Linux.
It’s no secret that Microsoft has tied DirectX to Xbox and Windows. What is surprising is that they are exploring Mesa, Linux and the open source software implementation of OpenGL. jesse natalie, Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft, is working on adding and improving computing support D3D12 in OpenGL via Desk. In addition, it hints that there will be future improvements in the project. Of the Jesse’s merge request:
This adds a parallel state tracking to the computation. In some cases, graphics state tracking is simply extended (for example, resources bound to shaders), in others it is duplicated (for example, additional pipeline caches), and in others it is refactored. The end result is ARB_compute_shader computation support with a bit of a slow path for indirections. Now that compute support is available, we can start hooking up compute shaders for things that need emulation in the future, like a faster path for indirect sends that need state vars.
Although the purpose of D3D12 compute shader support in Mesa is unclear, it could be advantageous in datacenters. maybe in Azure, where Microsoft offers GPU-optimized VMs for workloads that require custom configuration.