Design of the GLES Tracing Library Code Runtime Behavior: Initialization: egl_display_t::initialize() calls initEglTraceLevel() to figure out whether tracing should be enabled. Currently, the shell properties "debug.egl.trace" and "debug.egl.debug_proc" together control whether tracing should be enabled for a certain process. If tracing is enabled, this calls GLTrace_start() to start the trace server. Note that initEglTraceLevel() is also called from early_egl_init(), but that happens in the context of the zygote, so that invocation has no effect. egl_display_t::initialize() then calls setGLHooksThreadSpecific() where we set the thread specific gl_hooks structure to point to the trace implementation. From this point on, every GLES call is redirected to the trace implementation. Application runtime: While the application is running, all its GLES calls are directly routed to their corresponding trace implementation. For EGL calls, the trace library provides a bunch of functions that must be explicitly called from the EGL library. These functions are declared in glestrace.h Application shutdown: Currently, the application is killed when the user stops tracing from the frontend GUI. We need to explore if a more graceful method of stopping the application, or detaching tracing from the application is required. Code Structure: glestrace.h declares all the hooks exposed by libglestrace. These are used by EGL/egl.cpp and EGL/eglApi.cpp to initialize the trace library, and to inform the library of EGL calls. All GL calls are present in GLES_Trace/src/gltrace_api.cpp. This file is generated by the GLES_Trace/src/genapi.py script. The structure of all the functions looks like this: void GLTrace_glFunction(args) { // declare a protobuf // copy arguments into the protobuf // call the original GLES function // if there is a return value, save it into the protobuf // fixup the protobuf if necessary // transport the protobuf to the host } The fixupGLMessage() call does any custom processing of the protobuf based on the GLES call. This typically amounts to copying the data corresponding to input or output pointers.