I'm assuming that these drivers are userspace drivers, whatever interface they have with the kernel is another problem. The presence of SurfaceFlinger in these

I'm assuming that these drivers are userspace drivers, whatever interface they have with the kernel is another problem. The presence of SurfaceFlinger in these decisions seems to be derived from some speculation in an article, not based on what Canonical themselves have said. When it comes to embedded hardware graphics, the industry is coalescing around Android as a kind of HAL/BSP, and so other projects that want to support off the shelf available consumer hardware either end up having to adopt Bionic or develop a solution like libhybris. This allows non-Android systems to use the same hardware accelerated EGL drivers. SurfaceFlinger is one option for managing hardware buffers and blitting between surfaces in the main and GPU memory.