OneAPI/L0, OpenVINO and OpenCL coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux for Intel GPUs

We are happy to announce, that in partnership with Intel, we are bringing support for hardware accelerated OneAPI/L0, OpenVINO and OpenCL on Intel GPUs to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Support for these APIs in WSL further increases the choices of compute APIs available to developers and ensures the best performance and functionality can be achieved on Intel GPU platforms. These enable Windows developers targeting applications or containers running on Linux to develop and test their workload locally on their Windows PC at near native performance using the tools and APIs they are used to.

Hardware acceleration for these APIs is available for both Windows 11 today and for Windows 10 with the 21H2 update which extends support for vGPU in WSL to Windows 10. Developers need to be running WSL 2 to get access to the vGPU.

Please go over to Intel’s blog for details on how to get started using this today.

This announcement represents an important milestone for our vGPU support within WSL. When we announced this support over a year ago, there were concerns raised by the community that although we had an open source kernel driver for our vGPU, the only userspace APIs available at the time were closed source.

This announcement brings our first fully open source userspace compute APIs for our vGPU solution. Although we will continue to support popular closed source APIs as well, the community will now have access to a fully open source implementation for a compute stack on top of our vGPU solution on Intel platforms.

We would like to thank our partner Intel for all their support and effort in making this possible.