On Tuesday 22 October 2002 12:47 pm, you wrote:
Greg -
I've been following the RPC merges lately, looks like a lot of stuff added. I browsed the code, but I couldn't really get a grasp on some of it.
That's OK, I'm not sure /I've/ got a grasp on some of it !! ;)
I was just wondering if you'd like to write an update (short, long, whatever) about what you've done, what's left to do, major stumbling blocks, etc. I'll include it in the next issue of Wine Weekly News.
Above what Ove already implemented, I really haven't done all that much. Frankly, in its current state, it is quite possible that the RPC work I am doing will /detract/ from the stability of wine, until the implementation is more complete. RPC is painfully complicated, and a victim of serious creeping featurism. Microsoft makes it worse by providing poorly documented extentions to the protocol, and a largely undocumented marshalling API (much of which developers typically don't have to learn because the API calls are generated by the MIDL compiler).
My target right now is to get a "hello world" API invocation to work across processes using wine RPC. Once that is achieved, I plan to create a unit test for this. Then, we'll have a framework that we can begin to extend and implement "properly." I am not there yet, but I think I'm getting close. I just have to implement marshalling for strings, which, in theory, looks pretty easy. There are probably many bugs that need squashing before it works, and maybe some additional gaps in functionality that I don't even realize exist yet... but I do think I'm pretty near.
Now, what remains to be done? Well, as Ove mentions in the TODO for his units, "a whole lot." Here are several things in no particular order:
- widl is like MIDL for wine. For wine to be a useful RPC platform, quite a bit of work needs to be done here. widl currently doesn't generate stubs for RPC invocation -- it will need to; this is tricky because the MIDL compiler does some really wierd stuff. Then again, we don't neccesarily have to make widl work like MIDL, so it could be worse.
- RPC has a quite featureful error handling mechanism; none of it is implemented right now.
- The server portions of the patch don't seem to be getting accepted by Alexandre. My guess is that once I have a working test he'll conceed to let this in. To implement this properly is tricky and possibly beyond my abilities; Ove seems to think the right way to do this is to use LPC (Local Procedure Call, another undocumented monster). LPC has no implementation in wine and is not going to be trivial to create.
- there are several different memory allocation schemes for MSRPC. I don't even understand what they all are yet, much less have them properly implemented.
- MSRPC provides impersonation capabilities which currently are not possible to implement in wine.
- Some transports are not yet implemented. The existing transport implementations are incomplete. (By transports I mean, tcp/ip, named-pipes, local procedure call, etc --- the various types of low-level plumbing that can be used to connect the client and the server).
- Data marshalling is the means by which RPC represents data across process and machine boundaries. MSRPC extends NDR format for this. The wire protocol is mostly documented, but the MS API's to convert data-types in memory into NDR are not. This, alone, is a sizable chunk of work.
- ORPC is RPC for OLE; once we have a working RPC framework, we can use it to implement out-of-process OLE client/server communications. This will be a huge win for wine. But again, it's a lot of work, and I'm no OLE expert (hell, I'm no RPC expert :)
- Surely there is much more stuff I am forgetting. Like Ove said, it's "a whole lot" of stuff, approximately as big a project as, say, DirectX.
Basically, RPC for wine is a huge beast of a project. IMO it is probably the biggest and most difficult-to-fill hole in wine's feature-completeness ATM. In the short term, don't expect any miracles --- I really doubt that I'm going to "solve" this (in my spare time!) anytime soon. But, once I start getting some results, I imagine others will be enticed to help out, as contributors like Ove already have. (To be clear: Ove enticed me, not the other way around: He did all the "real" work, and deserves way more credit than me for any success I may achieve in the near future).
wish me luck,