Analysis of a software based hardware composer adaptation

The Android operating system uses the hardware composer module to write visual outputs to buffers that will be shown on the screen. The module is device-specific, meaning that it is up to the device vendors to implement the functionality. The hardware composer is usually implemented to support hardware rendering, which provides a performance boost, but it makes the implementation dependent on graphics drivers. These dependencies limit the number of devices that can use certain implementations because they may lack the access to required drivers, or the drivers may have differences in the case of open source ones. Software rendering can be used to eliminate these problems and grant portability at the expense of performance. Hardware composers that use software rendering are convenient for Android systems running inside a virtual environment such as a Linux container, because they grant them independence from the host hardware. This paper will analyze the modifications made to an open source, hardware dependent implementation of a hardware composer to use software rendering, and thus be able to run on any platform that can support a Wayland graphics environment.