WSL 2 GPU Support is Here

At Microsoft Build in the first half of the year, Microsoft demonstrated some awesome new capabilities and improvements that were coming to Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 including the ability to share the host machine’s GPU with WSL 2 processes. Then in June Craig Loewen from Microsoft announced that developers working on the Windows insider ring machines could now make use of GPU for the Linux workloads. This support for NVIDIA CUDA enabled developers and data scientists to use their local Windows machines for inner-loop development and experimentation. 

Last week, during the Docker Community All Hands, we announced the availability of a developer preview build of Docker Desktop for WSL 2 supporting GPU for our Developer Preview Program. We already have more than 1,000 who have joined us to help test preview builds of Docker Desktop for Windows (and Mac!). If you’re interested in joining the program for future releases you should do it now!

Today we are excited to announce the general preview of Docker Desktop support for GPU with Docker in WSL2. There are over one and a half million users of Docker Desktop for Windows today and we saw in our roadmap how excited you all were for us to provide this support.

Preview of Docker Desktop with GPU support in WSL2

To get started with Docker Desktop with Nvidia GPU support on WSL 2, you will need to download our technical preview build.

Once you have the preview build installed there are still a couple of steps you will need to do to get started using your GPU: 

• You will need access to a PC with an Nvidia GPU (if you don’t have this we would still like feedback on this build, we have changed a fair bit in our VM to get this working!) 
• The latest Windows Insider version from the Dev preview ring 
• Beta drivers from Nvidia supporting WSL 2 GPU paravirtualization: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/wsl
• WSL 2 backend enabled in Docker Desktop

Once you have all of this working you can have a go at the command below to check that GPU support is working. 

Keep in mind that this is a technical preview release: it may break, it has not been tested as thoroughly as our normal releases and ‘here be dragons’. 

If you do find issues and want to give us feedback, please raise bugs on our public repo https://github.com/docker/for-win. We use this feedback to improve the product and your support in testing this will help us get this ready for GA sooner 🙂 

Enjoy the tech preview and happy GPU Hacking!