This is the mail archive of the cygwin-developers mailing list for the Cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Cygwin's spawn/exec, mintty and the "Program Compatibility Assistant"


On Feb 17 11:34, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> This is not only about the manifest apparently.  [...]

Nope, this is *ALL* about the manifest, apparently.

I still don't understand what's going on, but I finally puzzled out that
it's not only mintty.

In fact, if I start *any* self-built console process directly from
Windows Explorer I find the process being part of a PCA job!  If I
start CMD first, and then the console application from there, there'
no job object involved.

This is NOT Cygwin-only.  This also occurs with self-built non-Cygwin
(mingw) applications.  And what's even more puzzeling is the fact that
adding an "asInvoker" manifest, internal or external, doesn't help
anything...

On W7!  On Vista, the manifest helps.

Some more digging on MSDN turned up two interesting blogs from a guy
calling himself "the App Compat Guy":

First, here's the blog entry which describes why this doesn't work on
W7.  It's a funny one, since he's not very happy with what happens on
W7, apparently:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cjacks/archive/2009/06/18/pca-changes-for-windows-7-how-to-tell-us-you-are-not-an-installer-take-2-because-we-changed-the-rules-on-you.aspx

While he talks about installers, the "per OS" manifest problem
apparently applies to all apps.

The second blog entry tells how to drop off from a PCA job:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/cjacks/archive/2009/07/10/how-to-work-around-program-compatibility-assistant-pca-jobobjects-interfering-with-your-jobobjects.aspx

Well, that's pretty much exactly what we're doing in Cygwin's spawn/exec
code now.

Bottom line:

- From observation I assume that it's all about having a runlevel manifest
  or not.  On W7 the binary additionally needs a special W7 compatible
  manifest.

- Console applications are only affected when started directly from the
  GUI.  If they are started from a correctly-manifested console app (CMD),
  they and their children are not affected anymore.

- So we would have to create all executables with a W7-compatible
  manifest.  That is quite certainly not an option.

- So we have to keep the CREATE_BREAKAWAY_FROM_JOB stuff in Cygwin
  for the time being.


Corinna

-- 
Corinna Vinschen                  Please, send mails regarding Cygwin to
Cygwin Project Co-Leader          cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Red Hat


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]