Creation of chromium binaries in /tmp/

[malinka-2233]

Hey. While using the latest zui deb package v1.4.1 i noticed, that there are chromium binary files being created and executed at runtime. My question is - what part of the build\packaging of zui causes them to appear and is there anything to be done to avoid that?
Maybe i can manually unpack asar and run the electron part without using the resulting zui binary or is there any other way?

[philrz]

@malinka-2233: Thanks for reporting. We were not previously aware it was doing this.

For the benefit of our developers, I've attached a video that reproduces the issue with GA Zui v1.4.1 on Ubuntu 20.04. I start out with the /tmp directly cleaned of any .org.chromium.Chromium.* files. Then I start a watch -d -n 1 ls -lR /tmp/.org* and open/exit Zui repeatedly. As it shows, those Chromium files do indeed accumulate.

Repro.mp4

I did some web searching and it looks like another project at element-hq/element-web#17188 struggled with the exact same symptom. In their case it looks like they were able to solve it using the change in https://github.com/vector-im/element-desktop/pull/337/files. What I don't know is if Zui uses "native modules" in a similar way and if it would benefit from the same fix. However, one of our developers will likely chime in with more insight on that.

[malinka-2233]

Thank you for clarifying, i assumed it was known so was not going into the details.
In the meantime - if there are any different ways of launching an already packaged (and then unpacked?) zui, that bypass the zui binary - please let me know. I figured i could run the electron part in the unpacked asar archive using just
electron .
but thats only one part.

[nwt]

What I don't know is if Zui uses "native modules" in a similar way and if it would benefit from the same fix.

Apparently it does.

$ npm exec asar list /Applications/Zui.app/Contents/Resources/app.asar | grep '\.node$'
/node_modules/keytar/build/Release/keytar.node
/node_modules/node-pipe/build/Release/pipe.node

[philrz]

Verified in Zui Insiders 1.4.2-8, which is based on Zui commit 288bb82. In the video below, the original repro steps are repeated with that release and we no longer see the .org.chromium.Chromium.* files accumulating in /tmp. By comparison the previous Zui Insiders release 1.4.2-7 still had the original symptom (not shown here).

Verify.mp4

The next GA Zui release will have this fix as well. I hope to have that release out some time next week.