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firezone/rust/client-ffi
Thomas Eizinger faeb958882 refactor: use UniFFI for Android FFI (#9415)
To make our FFI layer between Android and Rust safer, we adopt the
UniFFI tool from Mozilla. UniFFI allows us to create a dedicated crate
(here `client-ffi`) that contains Rust structs annotated with various
attributes. These macros then generate code at compile time that is
built into the shared object. Using a dedicated CLI from the UniFFI
project, we can then generate Kotlin bindings from this shared object.

The primary motivation for this effort is memory safety across the FFI
boundary. Most importantly, we want to ensure that:

- The session pointer is not used after it has been free'd
- Disconnecting the session frees the pointer
- Freeing the session does not happen as part of a callback as that
triggers a cyclic dependency on the Rust side (callbacks are executed on
a runtime and that runtime is dropped as part of dropping the session)

To achieve all of these goals, we move away from callbacks altogether.
UniFFI has great support for async functions. We leverage this support
to expose a `suspend fn` to Android that returns `Event`s. These events
map to the current callback functions. Internally, these events are read
from a channel with a capacity of 1000 events. It is therefore not very
time-critical that the app reads from this channel. `connlib` will
happily continue even if the channel is full. 1000 events should be more
than sufficient though in case the host app cannot immediately process
them. We don't send events very often after all.

This event-based design has major advantages: It allows us to make use
of `AutoCloseable` on the Kotlin side, meaning the `session` pointer is
only ever accessed as part of a `use` block and automatically closed
(and therefore free'd) at the end of the block.

To communicate with the session, we introduce a `TunnelCommand` which
represents all actions that the host app can send to `connlib`. These
are passed through a channel to the `suspend fn` which continuously
listens for events and commands.

Resolves: #9499
Related: #3959

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Signed-off-by: Thomas Eizinger <thomas@eizinger.io>
Co-authored-by: Jamil Bou Kheir <jamilbk@users.noreply.github.com>
2025-06-17 21:48:34 +00:00
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