Gradients can be thought of, at a very high level, as three pieces:
GrClampedGradientEffect handles clamped and decal tile modes, while GrTiledGradientEffect implements repeat and mirror tile modes. The GrClampedGradientEffect requires border colors to be specified outside of its colorizer child, but these border colors may be defined by the gradient color stops. Both of these master effects delegate calculating a t interpolant to a child process, perform their respective tile mode operations, and possibly convert the tiled t value (guaranteed to be within 0 and 1) into an output color using their child colorizer process.
Because of how child processors are currently defined, where they have a single half4 input and a single half4 output, their is a type mismatch between the 1D t value and the 4D inputs/outputs of the layout and colorizer processes. For now, the master effect assumes an untiled t is output in sk_OutColor.x by the layout and it tiles solely off of that value.
However, layouts can output a negative value in the w component to invalidate the gradient location (currently on the two point conical gradient does this). When invalidated, the master effect outputs transparent black and does not invoke the child processor. Other than this condition, any value in y, z, or w are passed into the colorizer unmodified. The colorizer should assume that the valid tiled t value is in sk_InColor.x and can safely ignore y, z, and w.
Currently there are color interpolators (colorizers) for analytic color cases (evaluated directly on the GPU) and sampling a generated texture map.
GrGradientShader provides static factory functions to create GrFragmentProcessor graphs that reproduce a particular SkGradientShader.