Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac was observed to garble Chinese text
typed through its local Pinyin IME: the composed characters would
land with pieces missing or extra characters deleted from the
document. Root cause, confirmed with debug logging plus dbus-monitor
on the live ibus session bus: the client forwards the raw
pre-composition keystrokes over the normal RDP keyboard channel while
composing (these reach XrdpIme's process-key-event handler and, since
it never consumes anything, get typed into the document as literal
ASCII), then once composition finishes sends a compensating burst of
Backspace keystrokes sized to exactly undo them, interleaved with the
final composed text arriving over the separate TS_UNICODE_KEYBOARD_EVENT
side channel. The two channels have no ordering guarantee, so the
side-channel commit could land in the middle of the client's own
backspace cleanup and get partially deleted.
Measured the backspace burst against the leaked raw-character count
across several phrases (23-for-23, 29-for-29) - it's always exactly
right, so this is a pure interleaving race, not a client miscount.
That makes it fixable server-side: xrdp_input_queue_source_prepare/
_check now withhold a queued commit until raw key traffic on the
engine has been quiet for XRDP_INPUT_COMMIT_QUIET_US (100ms), so the
client's own cleanup has time to finish first, capped by
XRDP_INPUT_COMMIT_MAX_WAIT_US (500ms) so back-to-back composition
can't delay a commit indefinitely. This is an empirical mitigation
tuned to observed client behaviour, not a protocol guarantee.
Also fixes two latent data races found while reviewing this code
against the cross-thread invariants already documented at the top of
the file: g_engine and last_input_name are written by the IBus thread
(engine enable/disable, an unexpected daemon disconnect) but were read
and, for last_input_name, also written directly by xrdp_input_enable()
on chansrv's own thread with no synchronization - unlike `bus`, which
already gets this treatment. Both now follow the same
publish/clear-under-state_mutex pattern as `bus`.
Added IBUS-KEY/IBUS-COMMIT debug logging used to diagnose this.
Verified live against a real Microsoft Remote Desktop for Mac client
connected to an xrdp/ibus session: multiple Chinese phrases of varying
length composed and committed cleanly with the debounce in place,
after reliably reproducing the interleaved garbling without it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Liyi Meng
f35530b523