Changes

* SurfaceFlinger (the Android compositor) configures it to have 2--3 buffer (depending on [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_support_package BSP]) and run synchronously.

* Google Miracast uses it to encode OpenGL-rendered surfaces on-the-fly.

Let us now describe how the client-server SurfaceTexture system allocates GraphicBuffer's, and how both the client and server sides keep track of these shared buffer handles. Again, SurfaceTexture is the server-side class, while SurfaceTextureClient is the client-side class. Each of them stores an array of GraphicBuffers, which is called mSlots in both classes. The GraphicBuffer objects are separate instances in SurfaceTexture and in SurfaceTextureClient, but the underlying buffer handles are the same. The mechanism here is as follows. The client side issues a SurfaceTextureClient::dequeueBuffer call to get a new buffer to paint to. If there is not already a free buffer in mSlots, and the number of buffers is under the limit (e.g. 3 for triple buffering), it sends an IPC message that results in a call to SurfaceTexture::dequeueBuffer which allocates a GraphicBuffer. After this transaction, still inside of SurfaceTextureClient::dequeueBuffer, another IPC message is sent, that results in a call to SurfaceTexture::requestBuffer to get the GraphicBuffer serialized over IPC back to it, using GraphicBuffer::flatten and GraphicBuffer::unflatten, and cache it into its own mSlots. The mSlots arrays on both sides mirror each other, so that the two sides can refer to GraphicBuffer's by index. This allows the client and server side to communicate with each other by passing only indices, without flattening/unflattening GraphicBuffers again and again.