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zypak

Allows you to run Chromium based applications that require a sandbox in a Flatpak environment, by using LD_PRELOAD magic and a redirection system that redirects Chromium's sandbox to use the Flatpak sandbox. Zypak is actively used by the majority of the Electron and Chrome-based Flatpaks on Flathub.

Basic usage

This requires your Flatpak to be using:

  • org.freedesktop.Platform / Sdk version 21.08 or later.
  • org.electronjs.Electron2.BaseApp as your base app. Recent releases include Zypak built-in.

Now, instead of running your Electron binary directly, call it via zypak-wrapper PATH/TO/MY/ELECTRON/BINARY. Note that this will only work if your application is fully installed; simply running zypak-wrapper from a flatpak-builder --run shell or similar will fail.

Re-exec behavior

ZYPAK_SPAWN_LATEST_ON_REEXEC=1 will have Zypak detect when the app is re- exec'ing itself and attempt to spawn the latest version, in order for chrome://restart to function. (Previous versions of Zypak defaulted to this being enabled.)

Usage with a wrapper script

If ZYPAK_SPAWN_LATEST_ON_REEXEC=1 is set, and Zypak was invoked by some sort of wrapper script, make sure you set CHROME_WRAPPER= to the path of said script. Otherwise, if the application attempts to re-exec itself (i.e. chrome://restart), it won't be using the wrapper on re-exec, leading to potentially unexpected behavior.

Widevine support

Chromium and variants often cannot legally distribute Widevine themselves, so the binaries are downloaded at runtime, usually into a folder named WidevineCdm located somewhere under the browser's data storage directory. For instance:

  • Chromium downloads Widevine to: ~/.var/app/org.chromium.Chromium/config/chromium/WidevineCdm
  • Brave downloads Widevine to: ~/.var/app/com.brave.Browser/config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser/WidevineCdm

This directory will also usually contain one or more of these files:

  • latest-component-updated-widevine-cdm
  • manifest.json

In order for the Widevine path to be exposed to the sandbox, you must set ZYPAK_EXPOSE_WIDEVINE_PATH= to the full path to this Widevine directory. Otherwise, the CDM module will be downloaded, but the browser will be unable to load it.

The easiest way to test if Widevine is working is this test page; if ZYPAK_EXPOSE_WIDEVINE_PATH= was set incorrectly, you'll see a message like this:

Unable to instantiate a key system supporting the required combinations
(DRM_NO_KEY_SYSTEM)

Alternate sandbox binary names

Some applications like Microsoft Edge use a custom file name for the sandbox binary name, rather than the default of chrome-sandbox. In that case, you may see messages like this:

The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without
sandboxing I'm aborting now. You need to make sure that /app/extra/msedge-sandbox is owned by root
and has mode 4755.

To fix this, set ZYPAK_SANDBOX_FILENAME=the-sandbox-basename, e.g. ZYPAK_SANDBOX_FILENAME=msedge-sandbox.

Setting LD_PRELOAD

Zypak needs to override LD_PRELOAD in order to inject its redirection libraries into the application process. If you need to add your own libraries to LD_PRELOAD, place them in ZYPAK_LD_PRELOAD, which will result in Zypak adding them to the LD_PRELOAD list, in addition to its own required libraries.

CEF support

If the application uses CEF, set ZYPAK_CEF_LIBRARY_PATH to the absolute path to the libcef.so library.

Using a different version

If you want to try a different Zypak version for testing, or without using the Electron baseapp, then find the release tag you want to use and add one of these modules somewhere in your Flatpak manifest:

{
  "name": "zypak",
  "sources": [
    {
      "type": "git",
      "url": "https://github.com/refi64/zypak",
      "tag": "THE_RELEASE_TAG"
    }
  ]
}
- name: zypak
  sources:
    - type: git
      url: https://github.com/refi64/zypak
      tag: THE_RELEASE_TAG

Debugging

  • Set ZYPAK_DEBUG=1 to enable debug logging.
  • Set ZYPAK_STRACE=all to run strace on the host and child processes.
    • To make it host-only or child-only, set ZYPAK_STRACE=host or ZYPAK_STRACE=child, respectively.
    • If only some child processes should be searched, use ZYPAK_STRACE=child:type1,type2,..., e.g. ZYPAK_STRACE=child:ppapi,utility to trace all children of --type=utility and --type=ppapi.
    • Set ZYPAK_STRACE_FILTER=expr to pass a filter expression to strace -e.
    • In order to avoid arguments being ellipsized, set ZYPAK_STRACE_NO_LINE_LIMIT=1.
  • Set ZYPAK_DISABLE_SANDBOX=1 to disable the use of the --sandbox argument (required if the Electron binary is not installed, as the sandboxed calls will be unable to locate the Electron binary).

How does it work?

Zypak works by using LD_PRELOAD to trick Chromium into thinking its SUID sandbox is present and still setuid, but all calls to it get instead redirected to another binary: Zypak's own sandbox.

This sandbox has two strategies to sandbox Chromium:

The mimic strategy

The mimic strategy works on the majority of Flatpak versions. It works by mimicking the zygote and redirecting all the incoming commands to actually become flatpak-spawn commands, then returning those PIDs as the results of the "fork". This does have the side effect of slower startup and higher memory usage, since there is no true zygote running, and thus this is only used where the spawn strategy (see below) does not work.

The spawn strategy

The spawn strategy a far better implementation, available on all Flatpak versions 1.8.2+. (Flatpak 1.8.0 and 1.8.1 are not really supported.) It relies on two particular new features in 1.8.0: expose-pids and SpawnStarted:

  • expose-pids lets the process that opens a new sandbox see the PIDs of the sandboxed processes. This essentially means it behaves much like using user namespaces to perform sandboxing and allows Chromium to see the true PIDs of its child processes rather than trying to use an intermediary (flatpak-spawn in the mimic strategy).
  • SpawnStarted is emitted when a sandboxed process fully starts, and it passes along the PID that can be used for the parent to reach the sandboxed children.

In this strategy, the zygote is no longer mimicked; rather, the actual zygote is run sandboxed, just like Chromium's official sandboxes work. The only difference is, the Flatpak sandbox is used instead of Chromium's setuid or namespace sandboxes.

This is a bit messy because Flatpak's sandboxing APIs all use D-Bus, so a new D-Bus session must be "injected" into the main Chromium process, which then runs in a separate thread and handles all the sandbox functionality. When the separate zypak-sandbox binary is started, it talks to this "supervisor" thread via a local socket pair, asking it to run the sandboxed process and staying alive until the sandboxed process completes. Meanwhile, the supervisor thread will swap out the sandbox PID for the true sandboxed process PID.

Rough layout of execution

  • When you use zypak-wrapper, it sets up the paths to the Zypak binary and library directories and then calls zypak-helper.
  • zypak-helper will set up the LD_PRELOAD environment and start the main process.
    • If the spawn strategy is being used, a supervisor thread is started to manage the sandboxed processes and communication with Flatpak.
  • When Chromium attempts to launch a sandboxed process, zypak-sandbox is used as the sandbox instead of the SUID sandbox, and it then does one of the following:
    • If the mimic strategy is being used, Zypak's mimic zygote will run, replacing the true zygote. All the zygote messages get handled, and process forks instead start a new process via flatpak-spawn.
    • If the spawn strategy is being used, the sandbox will send a message to the supervisor to start a new sandboxed process, then wait for the sandboxed process to exit.