EGL™ is an interface between Khronos rendering APIs such as OpenGL ES or OpenVG and the underlying native platform window system. It handles graphics context management, surface/buffer binding, and rendering synchronization and enables high-performance, accelerated, mixed-mode 2D and 3D rendering using other Khronos APIs.
Portable Layer for Graphics Resource Management
EGL can be implemented on multiple operating systems (such as Symbian, embedded Linux, Unix, and Windows) and native window systems (such as X and Microsoft Windows). Implementations may also choose to allow rendering into specific types of EGL surfaces via other supported native rendering APIs, such as Xlib or GDI. EGL provides:
- Mechanisms for creating rendering surfaces (windows, pbuffers, pixmaps) onto which client APIs can draw and share
- Methods to create and manage graphics contexts for client APIs
- Ways to synchronize drawing by client APIs as well as native platform rendering APIs.