First, the window manager tells us when a surface is no longer needed. At this point, several things happen:
- the surface is removed from the active/visible list
- it is added to a purgatory list, where it waits for all clients to release their reference
- it destroys all data/state that can be spared
Later, when all clients are done, the remains of the Surface are disposed off: it is removed from the purgatory and destroyed.
In particular its gralloc buffers are destroyed at that point (when we're sure nobody is using them anymore).
Surfaces are now destroyed once all references from the clients are gone, but they go through a partial destruction as soon as the window manager requests it.
This last part is still buggy. see comments in SurfaceFlinger::destroySurface()
