Render process cannot launch with unknown reason

[YingfangDu]

Hi,
Our product has been deployed to the customer devices for more than 1 years, and we notice that some devices cannot launch the Render process in anyway due to some configuration, for example some anti-virus software. These devices are all running Windows OS.

We have confirmed with one customer that her device has some IT deployment which will stop it from launching. Although at last, we do not find out what configuration may cause this issue as we never get a chance to talk with their IT department engineer. While we do confirm that this device can run Chrome browser.

And from some other devices, we notice that our application can launch at some cases, and occasionally it cannot launch the Renderer.
We have enabled the verbose log in CEF to understand the cause, and we do not get any useful log at all except this simple line:

Code: Select all

ERROR:browser_gpu_channel_host_factory.cc(139)] Failed to launch GPU process.

Do anyone know what kind of configuration from OS or anti-virus or device control software can do that? And does Chrome browser have special configuration or permission request when run on Windows OS?

And we did not run the CEF sample application from these devices due to signature issues.

Any information will be helpful.

Thanks for your time here.

[magreenblatt]

Most likely the AV has whitelisted Google Chrome. You can contact then to have your application whitelisted.

[ndesktop]

An AV will never block Chrome unless is infected.

I will ask if they have some kind of protection module on video devices (I know we have).
Looks like there is some heuristic detection - I know we have camera/audio/network/wifi protection detecting apps attempting to access PC audio/video devices, new unknown devices appearing in the connected networks etc.

GPU most likely does enum devices to find the active video (and maybe audio) devices.
Such an AV component watches for SetupDiGetClassDevs, SetupDiEnumDeviceInterfaces or whatever enumeration API is done.

Better to either generate a dump from your process and check if there are injected dlls in your process, look for av*, *shield*, *prot* or whatever is non-MS, non-your binaries.
If the protection is done at user level by injecting a dll and patching certain Win32 calls that would explain it.
Otherwise, it might be a driver solution which might have callbacks registered on certain objects (CmRegisterCallbacks, ObRegisterCallbacks, PsSetLoadImageNotifyRoutine etc. ) which might intercept calls and object opening from apps and devise heuristics to detect what apps attempts to access cameras, devices etc. Obviously the discussion is complex, but start from here and see where it leads.

[YingfangDu]

Thanks for the suggestion. We locally cannot reproduce this issue.
And we cannot do those testing from our customer devices. We have tried to contact them and did not get any responses back.

Is there any way that we can enable the 'dump' option you mentioned in CEF settings?

We can only collect some logs due to the privacy agreement.

[YingfangDu]

Most likely the AV has whitelisted Google Chrome. You can contact then to have your application whitelisted.

Thanks, this is what we do now through the support team.