Editing Windowing system (section)

===SurfaceFlinger===
[[Google]] developed a display server called SurfaceFlinger<ref name="Android system architecture">{{cite web |url=http://androidteam.googlecode.com/files/Anatomy-Physiology-of-an-Android.pdf |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160408053917/http://androidteam.googlecode.com/files/Anatomy-Physiology-of-an-Android.pdf |archive-date=2016-04-08 |title=Android system architecture }}</ref> for [[Android (operating system)|Android]]:

Everything in Android is rendered to a "surface"; "surfaces" are produced by applications and placed into a queue that is managed by SurfaceFlinger.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/Surface.html |title=Android Developer: Surface}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=https://source.android.com/devices/graphics/arch-sf-hwc.html |title=Android Developer: SurfaceFlinger and Hardware Composer}}</ref>

Yet another Android-specific solution is "Gralloc". Gralloc handles device memory i.e. it does allocation, arbitration, it handles synchronization via Android/Linux fence file descriptors. Gralloc competes with other solutions like e.g. Mesa's [[Generic Buffer Management]] (GBM) or Nvidia's EGLStreams. The Gralloc [[Hardware abstraction#In operating systems|hardware abstraction layer (HAL)]] is used to allocate the buffers that underlie "surfaces".

For compositing in Android, Surfaces are sent to SurfaceFlinger, which uses OpenGL ES to do the compositing.

Hardware Composer HAL (HWC) was introduced in Android 3.0 and has evolved steadily over the years. Its primary purpose is to determine the most efficient way to composite buffers with the available hardware. As a HAL, its implementation is device-specific and usually done by the display hardware OEM.