Marshalling tutorial

July 14, 2004

      Hi guys,

Here is the start of some notes on DCOM and OLE RPC. 

They're intended to help people like Duane who are hitting problems
caused by it, and possibly to form the basis of some decent
documentation for the developer guide. Things that only a few people
understand make me nervous, getting this stuff into writing will maybe
help increase the number of people working on Wine - at the very least
it means when people move on we're not left stranded.

Firstly, even though this is a reasonably high level overview it's not
exactly bed time reading. DCOM is massively complex, and tends to abuse
and duplicate terminology rampantly. If you read this and get confused
or don't understand it DON'T PANIC! That's perfectly normal.

I'll use the term "DCOM" to refer to all aspects of COM and OLE
marshalling though other terms could certainly be used too. DCOM is a
huge, sprawling part of the Windows API and it's impossible to cover it
all in one email. If people find this helpful maybe I'll write some
more. I'll assume a basic knowledge of COM (interfaces, IUnknown,
refcounts etc). The basics are well documented and there are plenty of
tutorials on the net.

Secondly, my understanding is not 100% complete and is still improving.
There may well be mistakes and omissions here. Hopefully Ove, Marcus,
Huw or somebody with a better understanding than I, will review it and
correct me.

BASICS

The basic idea behind DCOM is to take a COM object and make it location
transparent. That means you can use it from other threads, processes and
machines without having to worry about the fact that you can't just
dereference the interface vtable pointer to call methods on it.

You might be wondering about putting threads next to processes and
machines in that last paragraph. You can access thread safe objects from
multiple threads without DCOM normally, right? Why would you need RPC
magic to do that?

Well, the details of why you'd want to do that can be left until later.
For now, suffice it to say that COM lets you "marshal" interfaces into
other "apartments". An apartment (you may see it referred to as a
context in modern versions of COM) can be thought of as a location, and
contains objects. 

Every thread in a program that uses COM exists in an apartment. If a
thread wishes to use an object from another apartment, marshalling and
the whole DCOM infrastructure gets involved to make that happen behind
the scenes.

So. Each COM object resides in an apartment, and each apartment resides
in a process, and each process resides in a machine, and each machine
resides in a network. Allowing those objects to be used from *any* of
these different places is what DCOM is all about.

The process of marshalling refers to taking a function call in an
apartment and actually performing it in another apartment. Let's say you
have two machines, A and B, and on machine B there is an object sitting
in a DLL on the hard disk. You want to create an instance of that object
(activate it) and use it as if you had compiled it into your own
program. This is hard, because the remote object is expecting to be
called by code in its own address space - it may do things like accept
pointers to linked lists and even return other objects.

Very basic marshalling is easy enough to understand. You take a method
on a remote interface, copy each of its parameters into a buffer, and
send it to the remote computer. On the other end, the remote server
reads each parameter from the buffer, calls the method, writes the
result into another buffer and sends it back.

The tricky part is exactly how to encode those parameters in the buffer,
and how to convert standard stdcall/cdecl method calls to network
packets and back again. This is the job of the RPCRT4.DLL file - or the
Remote Procedure Call Runtime. 

The backbone of DCOM is this RPC runtime, which is an implementation of
DCE RPC [1]. DCE RPC is not naturally object oriented, so this protocol
is extended with some new constructs and by assigning new meanings to
some of the packet fields, to produce ORPC or Object RPC. You might see
it called MS-RPC as well.

RPC packets contain a buffer containing marshalled data in NDR format.
NDR is short for "Network Data Representation" and is similar the XDR
format used in SunRPC (the closest native equivalent on Linux to DCE
RPC). NDR/XDR are all based on the idea of graph serialization and were
worked out during the 80s, meaning they are very powerful and can do
things like marshal doubly linked lists and other rather tricky
structures.

In Wine, our DCOM implementation is *not* based on the RPC runtime, as
while few programs use DCOM even fewer use RPC directly so it was
developed some time after OLE32/OLEAUT32 were. Eventually this will have
to be fixed, otherwise our DCOM will never be compatible with
Microsofts. Bear this in mind as you read through the code however.

PROXIES AND STUBS

Manually marshalling and unmarshalling each method call using the NDR
APIs (NdrConformantArrayMarshall etc) is very tedious work, so the
Platform SDK ships with a tool called "midl" which is an IDL compiler.
IDL or the "Interface Definition Language" is a tool designed
specifically for describing interfaces in a reasonably language neutral
fashion, though in reality it bears a close resemblence to C++.

By describing the functions you want to expose via RPC in IDL therefore,
it becomes possible to pass this file to MIDL which spits out a huge
amount of C source code. That code defines functions which have the same
prototype as the functions described in your IDL but which internally
take each argument, marshal it using Ndr, send the packet, and unmarshal
the return.

Because this code proxies the code from the client to the server, the
functions are called proxies. Easy, right?

Of course, in the RPC server process at the other end, you need some way
to unmarshal the RPCs, so you have functions also generated by MIDL
which are the inverse of the proxies: they accept an NDR buffer, extract
the parameters, call the real function then marshal the result back.
They are called stubs, and stand in for the real calling code in the
client process.

The sort of marshalling/unmarshalling code that MIDL spits out can be
seen in dlls/oleaut32/oaidl_p.c - it's not exactly what it would look
like as that file contains DCOM proxies/stubs which are different, but
you get the idea. Proxy functions take the arguments and feel them to
the NDR marshallers (or picklers), invoke an NdrProxySendReceive and
then convert the out parameters and return code. There's a ton of goop
in there for dealing with buffer allocation, exceptions and so on - it's
really ugly code. But, this is the basic concept behind DCE RPC.

INTERFACE MARSHALLING

Standard NDR only knows about C style function calls - they can accept
and even return structures, but it has no concept of COM interfaces.
Confusingly DCE RPC *does* have a concept of RPC interfaces which are
just convenient ways to bundle function calls together into namespaces,
but let's ignore that for now as it just muddies the water. The primary
extension made by Microsoft to NDR then was the ability to take a COM
interface pointer and marshal that into the NDR stream.

The basic theory of proxies and stubs and IDL is still here, but it's
been modified slightly. Whereas before you could define a bunch of
functions in IDL, now a new "object" keyword has appeared. This tells
MIDL that you're describing a COM interface, and as a result the
proxies/stubs it generates are also COM objects.

That's a very important distinction. When you make a call to a remote
COM object you do it via a proxy object that COM has constructed on the
fly. Likewise, a stub object on the remote end unpacks the RPC packet
and makes the call. 

Because this is object-oriented RPC, there are a few complications: for
instance, a call that goes via the same proxies/stubs may end up at a
different object instance, so the RPC runtime keeps track of "this" and
"that" in the RPC packets.

This leads naturally onto the question of how we got those proxy/stub
objects in the first place, and where they came from. You can use the
CoCreateInstanceEx API to activate COM objects on a remote machine, this
works like CoCreateInstance API. Behind the scenes, a lot of stuff is
involved to do this (like IRemoteActivation, IOXIDResolver and so on)
but let's gloss over that for now.

When DCOM creates an object on a remote machine, the DCOM runtime on
that machine activates the object in the usual way (by looking it up in
the registry etc) and then marshals the requested interface back to the
client. Marshalling an interface takes a pointer, and produces a buffer
containing all the information DCOM needs to construct a proxy object in
the client, a stub object in the server and link the two together.

The structure of a marshalled interface pointer is somewhat complex.
Let's ignore that too. The important thing is how COM proxies/stubs are
loaded.

COM PROXY/STUB SYSTEM

COM proxies are objects that implement both the interfaces needing to be
proxied and also IRpcProxyBuffer. Likewise, COM stubs implement
IRpcStubBuffer and understand how to invoke the methods of the requested
interface.

You may be wondering what the word "buffer" is doing in those interface
names. I'm not sure either, except that a running theme in DCOM is that
interfaces which have nothing to do with buffers have the word Buffer
appended to them, seemingly at random. Ignore it and *don't let it
confuse you* :) This stuff is convoluted enough ...

The IRpc[Proxy/Stub]Buffer interfaces are used to control the proxy/stub
objects and are one of the many semi-public interfaces used in DCOM.

DCOM is theoretically an internet RFC [2] and is specced out, but in
reality the only implementation of it apart from ours is Microsofts, and
as a result there are lots of interfaces which *can* be used if you want
to customize or control DCOM but in practice are badly documented or not
documented at all, or exist mostly as interfaces between MIDL generated
code and COM itself. Don't pay too much attention to the MSDN
definitions of these interfaces and APIs.

COM proxies and stubs are like any other normal COM object - they are
registered in the registry, they can be loaded with CoCreateInstance and
so on. They have to be in process (in DLLs) however. They aren't
activated directly by COM however, instead the process goes something
like this:

- COM receives a marshalled interface packet, and retrieves the IID of
the marshalled interface from it

- COM looks in
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Interface/{whatever-iid}/ProxyStubClsId32 to retrieve
the CLSID of another COM object, which implements IPSFactoryBuffer. 

- IPSFactoryBuffer has only two methods, CreateProxy and CreateStub. COM
calls whichever is appropriate: CreateStub for the server, CreateProxy
for the client. MIDL will normally provide an implementation of this
object for you in the code it generates.

Once CreateProxy has been called, the resultant object is QId to
IRpcProxyBuffer, which only has 1 method, IRpcProxyBuffer::Connect [4]
This method only takes one parameter, the IRpcChannelBuffer object which
encapsulates the "RPC Channel" between the client and server.

On the server side, a similar process is performed - the PSFactoryBuffer
is created, CreateStub is called, result is QId to IRpcStubBuffer, and
IRpcStubBuffer::Connect is used to link it to the RPC channel.

RPC CHANNELS

Remember the RPC runtime? Well, that's not just responsible for
marshalling stuff, it also controls the connection and protocols between
the client and server. We can ignore the details of this for now,
suffice it to say that an RPC Channel is a COM object that implements
IRpcChannelBuffer, and it's basically an abstraction of different RPC
methods. For instance, in the case of inter-thread marshalling (not
covered here) the RPC connection code isn't used, only the NDR
marshallers are, so IRpcChannelBuffer in that case isn't actually
implemented by RPCRT4 but rather just by the COM/OLE DLLS (fixme: is
this actually correct?).

RPC channels are constructed on the fly by DCOM as part of the
marshalling process. So, when you make a call on a COM proxy, it goes
like this:

Your code -> COM proxy object -> RPC Channel -> COM stub object -> Their
code

HOW THIS ACTUALLY WORKS IN WINE

Right now, Wine does not use the NDR marshallers or RPC to implement its
DCOM. When you marshal an interface in Wine, in the server process a
_StubMgrThread thread is started. I haven't gone into the stub manager
here. The important thing is that eventually a _StubReaderThread is
started which accepts marshalled DCOM RPCs, and then passes them to
IRpcStubBuffer::Invoke on the correct stub object which in turn
demarshals the packet and performs the call. The threads started by our
implementation of DCOM are never terminated, they just hang around until
the process dies.

Remember that I said our DCOM doesn't use RPC? Well, you might be
thinking "but we use IRpcStubBuffer like we're supposed to ... isn't
that provided by MIDL which generates code that uses the NDR APIs?". If
so pat yourself on the back, you're still with me. Go get a cup of
coffee.

TYPELIB MARSHALLER

In fact, the reason for the PSFactoryBuffer layer of indirection is
because you not all interfaces are marshalled using MIDL generated code.
Why not? Well, to understand *that* you have to see that one of the
driving forces behind OLE and by extension DCOM was the development
Visual Basic. Microsoft wanted VB developers to be first class citizens
in the COM world, but things like writing IDL and compiling them with a
C compiler into DLLs wasn't easy enough.

So, type libraries were invented. Actually they were invented as part of
a parallel line of COM development known as "OLE Automation", but let's
not get into that here. Type libraries are basically binary IDL files,
except that despite there being two type library formats neither of them
can fully express everything expressable in IDL. Anyway, with a type
library (which can be embedded as a resource into a DLL) you have
another option beyond compiling MIDL output - you can set the
ProxyStubClsId32 registry entry for your interfaces to the CLSID of the
"type library marshaller" or "universal marshaller". Both terms are
used, but in the Wine source it's called the typelib marshaller.

The type library marshaller constructs proxy and stub objects on the
fly. It does so by having generic marshalling glue which reads the
information from the type libraries, and takes the parameters directly
off the stack. The CreateProxy method actually builds a vtable out of
blocks of assembly stitched together which pass control to _xCall, which
then does the marshalling. You can see all this magic in
dlls/oleaut32/tmarshal.c

In the case of InstallShield, it actually comes with typelibs for all
the interfaces it needs to marshal (fixme: is this right?), but they
actually use a mix of MIDL and typelib marshalling. In order to cover up
for the fact that we don't really use RPC they're all force to go via
the typelib marshaller - that's what the 1 || hack is for and what the
"Registering non-automation type library!" warning is about (I think).

WRAPUP

OK, so there are some (very) basic notes on DCOM. There's a ton of stuff
I have not covered:

- Format strings/MOPs
- Apartments, threading models, inter-thread marshalling
- OXIDs/OIDs, etc, IOXIDResolver
- IRemoteActivation
- Complex/simple pings, distributed garbage collection
- Marshalling IDispatch
- Structure of marshalled interface pointers (STDOBJREFs etc)
- Runtime class object registration (CoRegisterClassObject), ROT
- IRemUnknown
- Exactly how InstallShield uses DCOM

Then there's a bunch of stuff I still don't understand, like ICallFrame,
interface pointer swizzling, exactly where and how all this stuff is
actually implemented and so on.

But for now that's enough.

thanks -mike

FURTHER READING

Most of these documents assume you have knowledge only contained in
other documents. You may have to reread them a few times for it all to
make sense. Don't feel you need to read these to understand DCOM, you
don't, you only need to look at them if you're planning to help
implement it.

[1] http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009629399/toc.htm

[2] http://www.grimes.demon.co.uk/DCOM/DCOMSpec.htm

[3] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/com/htm/cmi...

[4] http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/com/htm/cmi...

http://www.microsoft.com/msj/0398/dcom.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/techresources/appserv/COM/DCOM/4_Connectio...

http://www.idevresource.com/com/library/articles/comonlinux.asp 
(unfortunately part 2 of this article does not seem to exist anymore, if it was ever written)

Mike Hearn

Andreas Mohr

Mike Hearn

Marcus Meissner

Mike Hearn

Marcus Meissner

Ove Kaaven

Mike Hearn

Mike Hearn

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