New pole! Instead of just focusing on the physical device name, what if we renamed both of them?:
0 Boosts
0 Likes
@karolherbst@chaos.social @gfxstrand@treehouse.systems I always thought Context suited well for a thing every other resource is bound up within
@erincandescent @gfxstrand That's a Vulkan device, no?
@karolherbst@chaos.social @gfxstrand@treehouse.systems idk I last did any major GPU programming before Vulkan 1.0 and my most recent true GPU experience is. uh. about 12 years old and in Verilog 
@karolherbst@chaos.social @gfxstrand@treehouse.systems If a device is the thing you create to do graphics, yeah
@erincandescent @gfxstrand yeah.. the device is what you create queues and memory allocations from
@karolherbst@chaos.social @gfxstrand@treehouse.systems Then I would have called that a (Graphics) Context
"Creating a graphics device" meaning anything other than "A new /dev/drm node appears that other programs can use to render things" is kinda terminological madness imo
@erincandescent @gfxstrand yeah.. the physical device vs device naming is kinda weird...
maybe they had good reasons for it back in the day, dunno.
@karolherbst @erincandescent Mostly just that naming things is one of the 3 hardest problems in computer science.
But yeah, to me the english mapping doesn't fully make sense. You don't create a device. The device is a thing that exists. But you can create a context from which everything else derives.
@karolherbst@chaos.social @gfxstrand@treehouse.systems Rare case of OpenGL (/EGL/GLX/...) being right
@gfxstrand ohh I think the "Device / Context" moves into the right direction.
I think the former can be something expressing the Device (doesn't even have to be a GPU) and the latter just the logical execution environment. Maybe some would even call it "queue" or so...
but then we have vulkan queues which are more like device subunits, so I guess context is fine.
Yeah.. I think that one is a good scheme in principle from an abstraction pov, but might want to ponder more on the precise terms.