I have a windows 10 HP tower workstation with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card, in which I installed UBUNTU 18.04 as an app (natively), by following the link:
I can access this graphic card in windows but I cannot access it in Ubuntu. I type the following command in the terminal:
lspci -kAnd I got the following messages:
pcilib: Cannot open /proc/bus/pci
lspci: Cannot find any working access method.I also typed: lshw -numeric -C display but it did not return any value.
2 Answers
I have no solid evidence to base this on, but it's possible that WSL does not actually expose all of the hardware claimed by the Host to the WSL Ubuntu environment. This may be why you can't work with it, because you don't have direct PCI access like you would in an Ubuntu installation directly on-system, but are instead basically 'containerized' within Windows. The underlying WSL abstraction library for syscalls also may not be permitted to have that access either.
EDIT: Per a request on whether this is the case or not on the WSL GitHub, it is currently not possible to access the GPU or the PCI bus directly.
As of right now you are not able to access your GPU inside of WSL. This is something that's very highly requested (it's our number 1 request on UserVoice!) and something we're already tracking here in this issue: #829. We're investigating how to make this possible, and will be sure to post any updates as soon as they are available.
They also indicated it is highly requested, and to track the request via this GitHub Issue specifically.
Sometimes it's good that Community-bot bumps older questions. The situation has definitely changed since this was originally asked and answered.
While it is still true that WSL2 is a virtualized platform that doesn't give you direct access to the hardware (in most cases), there have been two major advances recently regarding graphics:
First, with the release of Windows 11, the WSLg feature allows you to run graphical Linux apps directly from WSL2 in Windows. This does provide accelerated graphics in most cases as well.
Second, nVidia and AMD GPU's can now be accessed directory for GPU-compute tasks. This feature is available both in Windows 10 21H2 and Windows 11 (all releases).
