Advapi32: Service Control RPC

[Rolf Kalbermatter]

Robert Shearman [mailto:rob at codeweavers.com] wrote:

>> The current service control API directly accesses the registry for 
>> most things.
>> In native those fucntions are simple wrappers around RPC calls to the 
>> actual service.exe application. Mikolaj Zalewski offered about 3 
>> months ago a possible aproach to implement the service.exe program.  
>
>Yes, we need to dig that out again. I forget what was blocking it being
>committed.

I'm myself not exactly sure what the reasons where. It looks pretty ok
to me except that the way it is now with no real parameter verification
in the API function itself anymore before calling into the proxy stub,
the test framework will cause various debugger breaks because of the
RpcRaiseExceptions() in the proxy stubs. Also Mikolaj himself mentioned
at one point that this is not ready for commitment yet and I guess that
might influence Alexandre's decision quite a bit :-) 

> Exactly. The whole point of IDL in DCE/RPC is that it is 
> independent of the DCE/RPC implementation as long as the 
> generated code conforms to the NDR rules. With Microsoft's 
> implementation, most of the NDR rules are implemented in 
> rpcrt4 and all the IDL compiler as to do is output code to 
> call the buffer size, marshall, unmarshall and free functions 
> in the right order. widl should be correct in this respect. 
> (There are some shortcuts that midl/widl take for marshalling 
> base types and the alignments would have to be correct for 
> these, but these are simple to get right.)
> 
> There is no reason to use NdrClientCall2 for any purpose in Wine.
>
<snip>
> 
> No. Everything (except multi-dimensional arrays, possibly) 
> can already be done by the code we output already. Adding 
> code to output -Oicf proc format strings in widl would be 
> possible, but unnecessary.

Ok, but I have made some parameter protocols to NdrClientCall2
from native advapi32 and believe that using those MIDL format
informations could allow to make an idl file that would result
in a fully wire compatible protocol to the MS services.exe one.
It's not exactly trivial to decode the MIDL_ProcFormatString
but by verifying the generated MIDL generated code against those
protocolled parameters would certainly help a lot. A first not
through check seems to indicate that almost every service control
API has its own services.exe rpc message, so no ANSII to Widechar
translation in the Advapi32.dll! Probably because there was a
services.exe implementation before the widechar APIs got introduced.
Also the protocol message numbers seem to have some holes, probably
some undocumented APIs here.

> It also adds problems because gcc and MSVC have differing 
> opinions on how to return unions from functions. For this 
> reason, we have implemented NdrClientCall2 in Wine by 
> pretending it returns a LONG_PTR instead. widl would have to 
> decide on whether it wanted to be compatible with our 
> signature of the function or the MS one.

Isn't te difference with structs too?

Ok I let it at the way widl generates the svcctl code for now.
It's not like that code generates MBs of code and if widl is
good enough for most datatypes already then let it work that
way. It's also possible that the performance gain by the smaller
code is compensated by the more direct Ndr routine calls compared
to NdrClientCall(2) which has to marshall the data entirely based
on its own runtime type format parsing.

Rolf Kalbermatter