Question about servicifying a feature (Chrome queries Updater's policy)

[Xiaoling Bao]

Hi chromium-service experts,

I'm working on a feature that allows the Chrome browser to query Updater's policy and display the result in chrome://policy page.

A few relevant information:

• Updater is a standalone process built from //chrome/updater, it's not a long-running one.
• Updater has its own logic to compute its policies. Thus Chrome needs to query the policies by talking to Updater. This is different from most other policies, which Chrome can read/understand directly.

We plan to use mojom as the IPC mechanism between Chrome and Updater. I'd imagine that the IPC server runs inside Updater, and Chrome needs to bootstrap Updater. Does it make sense to servicify this feature? If yes, what's a good candidate location for the service code?

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Xiaoling

[Colin Blundell]

Thanks! To make sure that I'm understanding correctly, is the idea that when the chrome://policy page is loaded the browser process would spin up the updater process for the duration of time that the browser needs to query it for its policies, and the browser would then shut down the updater process once it receives those results back?

Best,

Colin

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[Xiaoling Bao]

Yes, exactly. 

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Xiaoling

[Colin Blundell]

Thanks! Putting it as a service in //chromes/services makes sense to me in that case.

[Xiaoling Bao]

Thank you for confirming. I'll give it a try.

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Xiaoling

[Xiaoling Bao]

May I ask another question?

I took a look at the existing services at //chrome/services, It looks that the server processes are launched indirectly, via ServiceProcessHost::Launch(), is that correct? If so, I don't see a way to specify the server process image path. Does it always assume chrome.exe is the image? What if I want to use another image to host the mojom server, say updater.exe?

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Xiaoling

[Colin Blundell]

On Fri, Feb 14, 2025 at 8:55 PM Xiaoling Bao <xiaol...@google.com> wrote:

May I ask another question?

I took a look at the existing services at //chrome/services, It looks that the server processes are launched indirectly, via ServiceProcessHost::Launch(), is that correct? If so, I don't see a way to specify the server process image path. Does it always assume chrome.exe is the image? What if I want to use another image to host the mojom server, say updater.exe?

Ah, that's an area that I'm not familiar with. +chromium-mojo to broaden the set of folks seeing this message.

[Alex Gough]

Does the update service already do what you want? https://source.chromium.org/search?q=mojom::UpdateService%3E%20-file:out%20-file:third_party%2F%5CS%2B%2Fthird_party&sq=&ss=chromium%2Fchromium%2Fsrc

Yes, exactly. 

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Xiaoling

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Xiaoling

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Xiaoling