Buffers & surfaces

Apparently, the whole point of this system is to display information to users and receive their feedback for additional processing. In this chapter, we'll explore the first of these tasks: showing pixels on the screen.

There are two primitives which are used for this purpose: buffers and surfaces, governed respectively by the wl_buffer and wl_surface interfaces. Buffers act as an opaque container for some underlying pixel storage, and are supplied by clients with a number of methods — shared memory buffers and GPU handles being the most common.