“My idea was: I want everything to be ready for when we get hardware. The problem is, we don’t have hardware. We don’t really know when it’s going to happen. So I thought, I’m in charge of graphics, I’m going to pretend I have a GPU. So I wrote a GPU, essentially. This way, I was able to write SurfaceFlinger using ‘GL.’ It was using real OpenGL ES, but it defaulted to software. And then, little by little, real hardware started to show up.” When Mathias said that he wrote a GPU, he meant that he wrote a virtual GPU; software that performed the same work as a GPU would, but in software instead
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