Once PixelFlinger and OpenGL ES were working, Mathias could implement SurfaceFlinger. Applications draw their graphics objects (buttons, text, images — whatever) into a buffer in memory and SurfaceFlinger posts that buffer to the screen, visible to the user. SurfaceFlinger was essentially the glue between the higher-level graphics operations happening in applications and the OpenGL ES layer that he had written previously, responsible for copying buffers around and displaying them to the user. The separation of app rendering from displaying the pixels on the screen was intentional; one of
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