orca/docs/reference/windows-process-enumeration.md

Reading the Windows process table

Orca needs three things from the Windows process table: who a PID's parent is (descendant walks and teardown identity), what a process is running (agent recognition), and how much memory/CPU it uses (Resource Manager).

Node cannot answer the first one without native code. That is why seven independent readers existed, each forking powershell.exe to run Get-CimInstance Win32_Process, with a wmic fallback that Windows 11 24H2 has since removed.

Use the native snapshot

src/main/windows/windows-process-table.ts is the only module that may read the table. It wraps a Toolhelp32 snapshot from @vscode/windows-process-tree.

import {
  readWindowsProcessTable,
  readWindowsProcessTableFresh
} from '../windows/windows-process-table'

• readWindowsProcessTable() — shared TTL cache. Use for anything periodic.
• readWindowsProcessTableFresh() — a snapshot that starts after the call. Use for teardown identity, where a cached row can predate the exit it is being asked about.

Both reject when the table cannot be read. Do not convert that into an empty array. An empty table is a claim that nothing is running, and callers act on that claim by declaring a tree dead or a shell childless. "Unavailable" has to stay distinguishable from "empty" — collapsing the two is how a PTY tree survived its own teardown (#9045).

Measured on Windows 11 with 1050 processes (p50 / p95):

	p50	p95
pid + ppid + name	15.9 ms	17.5 ms
+ memory + command line	30.6 ms	33.7 ms
Get-CimInstance via PowerShell	706 ms	723 ms

Those are the module's published figures. The flag set this module actually requests is CommandLine | CreationTime — not Memory, which cost a second OpenProcess(PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION | PROCESS_VM_READ) plus GetProcessMemoryInfo per process (src/process.cc:47-63) for a value nothing read. Dropping it halves the handles a snapshot opens. The remaining set sits between the two rows above and has not been measured separately; on a real Windows host, Get-Counter '\Process(Orca)\Handle Count' sampled across a snapshot cadence is the check.

Those CIM numbers are from a 1050-process host. The scan scales with process count: on a 1486-process Windows SSH host it measured 1.36 s and produced 4.8 MiB of JSON, against the fallback's 3 s and 8 MiB limits. Both limits match the pre-#15749 reader, so relay hosts are at parity rather than newly at risk — but the headroom is roughly 2x on time and 1.7x on bytes, not the ~4x the 706 ms figure implies. On overflow the output is truncated, the JSON fails to parse, and the read rejects, so a busy host loses the table rather than receiving a wrong one.

When a read wedges

The vendored reader pushes every callback onto a module-global queue and drains that queue only when the request holding its requestInProgress latch completes. If a Toolhelp32 snapshot never comes back — an EDR hook, a restricted token, a worker that dies — the latch is stuck for the life of the process and every later call parks another closure in that queue.

Two guards, and they work together:

• a 3 s deadline on each read, so a caller gets a rejection instead of a promise that never settles;
• a sticky wedge: once a read misses its deadline and has not called back, the module refuses every further read until that read's callback fires.

The wedge used to be a 30 s cooldown that let one probe through per window. That bounded the rate of new callbacks but not the total: a permanently wedged reader retained one more closure every 30 s for as long as the app ran, and each probe also blocked its caller for the full 3 s deadline first. Gating on the outstanding read instead bounds retention at exactly one callback, and gives up nothing on recovery — a probe queued behind the latch could never have observed recovery anyway, whereas the stuck callback firing is the drain itself. On the relay's bare addon, which has no queue of its own, it is also what keeps Orca from re-entering CreateToolhelp32Snapshot while a call is still running.

That last part is not just tidiness. The addon runs each read as a Napi::AsyncWorker, so a wedged read holds a libuv threadpool slot for good. On the relay the JS queue is not there to absorb the retries, so one probe per window would have pinned all four default threads inside ~2 minutes — hanging every async fs and DNS call in that process, not only the process table.

A wedge does not engage the PowerShell fallback; see the next section for why only absence does.

The relay has no binding, and falls back

Relay deployment installs only node-pty and @parcel/watcher on the remote host (RELAY_NATIVE_DEPS in src/main/ssh/ssh-relay-deploy.ts), so a Windows machine used as an SSH host has no @vscode/windows-process-tree at all. It is not added there on purpose. Both ways of installing it fail, and both were checked on a real Windows SSH host with 1486 processes:

Installing it normally rebuilds from source, and that build fails. The tarball carries a binding.gyp, so npm runs node-gyp rebuild regardless of what is already compiled inside it. On a host that already had MSVC Build Tools 2022 installed, that build still failed:

error MSB8040: Spectre-mitigated libraries are required for this project.

That is the requirement the binding.gyp hunk of our patch deletes, and the patch cannot reach a remote host — pnpm patches do not cross SSH. Relay deploy would then break outright rather than degrade: installNativeDeps throws on failure, and the toolchain-skip retry is gated to Linux.

Skipping the build and using the shipped binary returns a truncated table. Contrary to what this file used to claim, the published 0.8.0 tarball does contain build/Release/windows_process_tree.node — an MSVC build directory that looks accidentally published (.obj and .tlog files ship with it). It is N-API, so it loads on any modern Node. But it predates our patch and still has the process_count < 1024 cap, so on that 1486-process host:

LOADED OK
rows=1024
selfPid=21964 present=false

Exactly 1024 rows, with the querying process itself among the missing. The self-presence guard rejects that, so the fallback engages anyway — but only on hosts busy enough to cross the cap. That is worse than no binding at all: it works on a quiet machine and fails silently under load, which is precisely the shape of bug that survives testing.

So the constraint is not that no binary exists to ship. It is that the only binary available to ship is the broken one, and building the good one needs a toolchain the remote does not have.

Instead, windows-process-table.ts falls back to readWindowsProcessRowsWithCim (windows-process-table-cim-scan.ts), the Get-CimInstance scan this module replaced. The gate is deliberately narrow:

• it engages only when the module cannot be required, never when a loaded module fails, wedges, or returns an unreadable table — a present-but-failing reader must not silently start forking a shell at the caller's poll rate;
• a fallback that also fails still rejects, so "unavailable" never degrades into "nothing is running";
• the scan applies the same self-presence guard as the native path.

src/main/ssh/relay-native-dependency-coverage.test.ts asserts that every native addon reachable from the relay entry is either installed on relay hosts or listed there with the reason its absence is safe. That test exists because #15749 shipped this gap: the relay tests injected a fake module through __setWindowsProcessTreeLoaderForTests, so nothing exercised the real require.

Shipping the native reader to a relay anyway

The scan is the floor, not the destination: it costs ~1.4 s and a powershell.exe where the addon costs ~57 ms. Release builds therefore compile the addon and ship it as an optional relay artifact.

config/scripts/build-windows-process-tree-relay-addon.mjs builds it from the source pnpm has already patched, on a Windows runner, and refuses to run if any patch hunk is missing — the Spectre hunk fails loudly, the 1024-process hunk fails silently, and the relative gyp path dies at configure on Windows. The source is checked rather than the install trusted. It also reads the PE machine field of the output, because a cross-build that quietly emitted host arch would ship a binary the target cannot load.

Windows arm64 cross-compiles from the x64 runner — verified on real hardware, producing IMAGE_FILE_MACHINE_ARM64 (0xaa64) against x64's 0x8664. It needs the optional MSVC v143 ARM64 build tools component; without it node-gyp fails with MSB8020, which is why the addon build runs before the long packaging step. ORCA_REQUIRE_RELAY_NATIVE_ADDONS is a per-arch list so a future arch can be added best-effort before it is promoted to required.

windows-process-table.ts binds the bare addon directly rather than the package wrapper. That wrapper adds only a queue over getProcessList, and that queue is the wedge described above — it latches a module-global requestInProgress with no try/catch. This module already holds a single-flight and a deadline, so going straight to the addon drops the duplicate.

The artifact is optional in RELAY_ARTIFACTS: hashed when present, so a relay carrying it never shares an immutable directory with one that does not, and never probed, because requiring a file only a Windows build machine can produce would make a correct relay read as MISSING and redeploy forever. A relay built on any other OS keeps using the scan.

Why the package is patched

config/patches/@vscode__windows-process-tree@0.8.0.patch carries four hunks.

1. Spectre mitigation. The upstream binding.gyp requires Spectre-mitigated libraries, which Orca's Windows build agents do not install. node-pty is patched the same way for the same reason.
2. The 1024-process cap. GetRawProcessList stopped after 1024 entries. Measured on a real host with 1051 processes, the module returned exactly 1024 and the querying process was itself among the 27 missing. A truncated snapshot silently hides the descendants a teardown is trying to reap — the exact failure the native path exists to remove.
3. Absolute node-addon-api gyp path. require('node-addon-api').targets is cwd-relative. node-gyp on Windows evaluates it from the pnpm store realpath, then loads the relative path from the node_modules symlink, so node_addon_api.gyp resolves outside the repo and hourly Windows builds die at configure. node-pty is patched the same way for the same reason.
4. No PEB reads, no PROCESS_VM_READ. See below.

The typings claim commandLine is truncated at 512 characters. Measured, it is not: the longest observed on a real host was 26,059.

The command line comes from the kernel, not the target's memory

Upstream, GetProcessCommandLine opens every process with PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION | PROCESS_VM_READ and issues three chained ReadProcessMemory calls — PEB, RTL_USER_PROCESS_PARAMETERS, then the string — to recover the command line. Walking another process's address space for credentials-adjacent data on a repeating timer is what a credential dumper does, so Defender for Endpoint scores it as such regardless of intent. Nothing about the flag sets above changes that; only removing the read does.

Windows 8.1 added NtQueryInformationProcess's ProcessCommandLineInformation class (60), which returns the same string as a UNICODE_STRING the kernel builds, needing only PROCESS_QUERY_LIMITED_INFORMATION. Electron's floor is Windows 10, so every OS Orca supports has it. The entry point is resolved with GetProcAddress on ntdll.dll — it has no import library — and the size is probed with a null-buffer call that answers STATUS_INFO_LENGTH_MISMATCH.

The same hunk drops PROCESS_VM_READ from GetProcessMemoryUsage and GetCpuUsage, which acquired it and never read an address space: GetProcessMemoryInfo and GetProcessTimes are satisfied by PROCESS_QUERY_LIMITED_INFORMATION. Measured, both return identical values under the weaker right on every process that opens at all.

Measured on Windows 11, ~540 processes, counted in-process by replacing the addon's import table entries with counting stubs:

per CommandLine scan	before	after
OpenProcess calls	543	543
desired access	0x0410 (VM_READ | QUERY_INFORMATION)	0x1000 (QUERY_LIMITED_INFORMATION)
ReadProcessMemory	1128	0
p50 / p95	13.5 / 14.5 ms	12.3 / 13.5 ms

Command lines were byte-identical on every process both readers recovered (405/405, and 399/399 and 376/376 on other runs), including a 24,087-character argv with embedded quotes, non-ASCII characters and trailing whitespace, and a WOW64 target. The weaker right is also a strict superset in reach: three processes that refused PROCESS_QUERY_INFORMATION | PROCESS_VM_READ granted PROCESS_QUERY_LIMITED_INFORMATION, and none went the other way.

There is no PEB fallback, deliberately

An earlier revision kept the PEB reader for a kernel without class 60, behind a latch. That was wrong, and the reason is worth recording: ClassifyQueryFailure mapped STATUS_INVALID_INFO_CLASS / NOT_SUPPORTED / NOT_IMPLEMENTED from any single target onto a process-wide, one-way switch back to PROCESS_VM_READ plus three ReadProcessMemory per pid per scan, for the life of the process, with nothing observable from JS.

The environment this reader exists for is one where an EDR hooks ntdll. A hook that returns STATUS_INVALID_INFO_CLASS for a class it does not recognise would have silently reinstated the exact primitive the patch removes, on precisely the machines it was written for — and one stray status from one process was enough. The same applies under Wine or any instrumented ntdll.

So the fallback is gone rather than guarded. GetProcessCommandLine returns false and leaves the command line empty, which is already a normal outcome (WindowsProcessRow.command is documented as empty when a process denies a query handle, and callers fall back to the image name). Degrading to no command line is recoverable; silently resuming address-space reads is not.

This also makes the property checkable on the artifact rather than the source: the patched reader never calls ReadProcessMemory, so the symbol is absent from the compiled addon's import table. inspectWindowsProcessTreeAddon() in config/scripts/windows-process-tree-gyp-rebuild.mjs is that check, and it is the only way to tell the two binaries apart — see below. It answers clean / unpatched / missing rather than a boolean, because a binary that is not there has not been cleared, and a caller reading false as “verified” would pass exactly the thing the check exists to catch.

Because the returned UNICODE_STRING comes from that same hookable boundary, its Buffer and Length are bounds-checked against the allocation before the characters are encoded, and the probed size is capped at the header plus 64 KiB (Length is a USHORT) so a bogus size cannot turn into a bad_alloc that fails an entire scan instead of one process.

The published tarball ships a loadable unpatched prebuilt

@vscode/windows-process-tree@0.8.0 publishes build/Release/windows_process_tree.node in the tarball. It is node-addon-api, so it is ABI-stable and loads cleanly under both Node and Electron — and it was built from unpatched source, so it performs 1179 ReadProcessMemory calls and opens every process at 0x0410 per scan.

That matters because allowBuilds is false for this package and CI installs with --ignore-scripts, so nothing compiles it at install time. A require() health check cannot tell the two binaries apart, and a rebuild that is skipped — rebuild-native-deps.mjs soft-exits 0 on a Windows file lock during postinstall — leaves the upstream prebuilt in place and cached.

Four checks close that, all keyed on the absent ReadProcessMemory import:

• ensureWindowsProcessTreeCommandLinePatch() deletes a binary that still has it, so a skipped rebuild fails loudly instead of using the prebuilt;
• ensure-native-runtime.mjs treats such a binary as a load failure, which is what triggers the rebuild;
• the relay build asserts it on the artifact it just produced;
• loadWindowsProcessTree() asserts it again on the addon staged beside a relay bundle and refuses to bind one that still imports the symbol, falling back to the CIM scan. The build-time assertion is not enough on its own: a bundle and the addon beside it redeploy independently, so a host that has not taken a new bundle keeps whatever .node is already there.

What none of this does is narrow which processes are asked. A detailed scan still queries every pid, including lsass.exe; it now asks with the same right Task Manager uses instead of PROCESS_VM_READ. Restricting the command-line pass to Orca's own subtree is the complementary change, and it belongs with the identity/detailed reader split rather than here — a ppid-derived allowlist would miss exactly the detached, reparented descendants the trackers exist to find (#9045, #10475), so it needs the job-object membership as its source of truth.

Packaging

The addon is Windows-only, so it follows the same contract as windows-native-registry (asserted by config/scripts/package-electron-runtime-contract.test.mjs):

• an optionalDependency, so a macOS/Linux install tolerates its absence;
• not enabled in allowBuilds in pnpm-workspace.yaml — pnpm installs optional dependencies on every host, and macOS/Linux must never run node-gyp for it;
• listed in the win32 branch of rebuild-native-deps.mjs and ensure-native-runtime.mjs;
• copied into the packaged node_modules for win32 only.

The relay's copy is a separate artifact staged beside the bundle, so a relay host only picks up a rebuilt addon on redeploy. Until then it keeps whatever binary it already has, which is why the addon is checked again at load.

What the snapshot does not provide

CreationDate (process start time) has no equivalent. Anything using a start time to prove a PID has not been recycled — daemon identity, managed-hook ownership, and CPU accounting in the memory collector — still reads it through its own query. Those callers are not migrated.

Committed private bytes have no equivalent either, and the one memory value the snapshot can carry is unusable for the sizes Orca now sees: process.cc stores pmc.WorkingSetSize into a DWORD, so anything above 4 GB wraps. That is the second reason windows-process-resource-collector.ts still runs its own Get-CimInstance sweep — it needs PageFileUsage (commit) and the CPU-time counters in the same pass. Migrating it to the native table would cost both, and it is why this module no longer sets the Memory flag at all: the field had no reader, and asking for it opened a handle per process on every snapshot.

Start time is a proxy for identity, not identity. The durable answer for the process trees Orca itself spawns is an inherited handle: a job object names the tree Orca created, so no start-time comparison is needed. Those readers should be resolved that way rather than by adding a start time to this module.

Do not adopt getProcessCpuUsage() from the package. It takes both CPU samples inside one call with a blocking Sleep(1000) in the middle, which would hold a libuv threadpool slot for a full second out of the Resource Manager's two-second poll.

Owning a PTY's process tree

src/main/windows/windows-pty-job.ts is the counterpart to reading the table: it answers "is this tree mine, and how do I kill it?" with a handle instead of an inference.

node-pty is patched (config/patches/node-pty@1.1.0.patch) to create a job object per ConPTY and assign the shell to it under CREATE_SUSPENDED, before the shell can spawn anything. Assigning after the fact leaves a window in which a fast child escapes the job.

• terminatePtyJob(proc) — one TerminateJobObject call for the whole tree.
• listPtyJobProcessIds(proc) — the live pids under a tree that is still tracked, including children that detached from the console.

Measured on Windows 11 against a shell whose grandchild was spawned detached: job membership was [shell, grandchild] and one call killed both. Neither a parent-pid walk nor GetConsoleProcessList sees that grandchild — it leaves the console and reparents, which is what left claude.exe/node.exe/cmd.exe holding worktree directories open (#9045, #10475, #10897).

The per-PTY job deliberately does not set JOB_OBJECT_LIMIT_KILL_ON_JOB_CLOSE. Measured on Windows 11: with that flag, releasing the handle when the shell exits also kills whatever the user left running, so typing exit in a pane reaped a start /b server that used to survive. The job exists to make an explicit teardown exact, not to redefine what a clean exit means.

Reaping a dead daemon's shells (#9195, #10415) is therefore a second, nested job, not this one. The terminal daemon assigns itself to a kill-on-close job at startup (assignHostProcessToKillOnCloseJob); children inherit membership, so every pty is covered and the per-PTY jobs nest inside it. Its handle is released only when the daemon process dies, so a crashed daemon reaps its tree without changing what a clean shell exit means.

The split is the point. One job answers "kill exactly this pane's tree, now"; the other answers "do not strand anything if the host dies". Trying to get both from one job is what reaped users' backgrounded work on a clean exit.

It belongs to the daemon and never to the app: an app-main crash must still leave sessions alive, which .github/workflows/win-crash-survival-e2e.yml asserts. The app spawns the daemon detached and is itself in no job, so nothing is inherited across that boundary.

The consequence is that a PTY hosted by the app rather than the daemon gets a per-PTY job but no crash reaping. That is deliberate — the alternative is a kill-on-close job on the app, which is exactly what the crash-survival guarantee forbids.

Once the shell exits, node-pty drops its handle record and closes the job, so a terminated tree reports null rather than []. Null means unverifiable in the sense of ssh-execution-boundary.md — no job support, not a ConPTY, or no longer tracked. It is never evidence that processes died.

Both functions report unavailable / null rather than a false success when a pty has no job — an outer job without JOB_OBJECT_LIMIT_BREAKAWAY_OK (some EDR and container hosts) can refuse the assignment, and a pty started before this build has none. Callers must fall back, not conclude the tree is gone. That conflation is the original bug.

Known limitation: the baton table is not synchronised

node-pty keeps its per-terminal handles in a plain std::vector and erases from it on a detached exit thread, while get_pty_baton is called from the main JS thread. That race predates this change — PtyResize, PtyClear and PtyKill all read the table the same way — but terminatePtyJob adds an instance of it: the exit thread can close hJob between the lookup and TerminateJobObject.

Losing that race normally just returns FALSE, which surfaces as unavailable and falls back. The case that would not be benign is a recycled HANDLE value, where the call could reach a different job in the same process. Fixing it properly means synchronising node-pty's handle table rather than adding a lock around one accessor, so it is deliberately left alone here.

The patch must actually be compiled

node-pty prefers its upstream prebuild and only builds from source when npm_config_build_from_source is set or no prebuild exists for the platform. The Windows prebuild does not contain this patch, so a plain pnpm install on Windows yields a node-pty without the job-object exports — and terminatePtyJob then reports unavailable on every call, which is indistinguishable from a correctly degraded build.

Packaging is unaffected: rebuild-native-deps.mjs rebuilds node-pty from source for Electron and restores the ConPTY runtime files that a bare node-gyp rebuild skips. The gap is the node-runtime test environment, which is why the Windows CI job rebuilds from source before running the win32 suites.

isPtyJobOwnershipAvailable() exists for exactly this: the win32 suite asserts it is true before asserting anything else, so an unpatched binary fails loudly instead of passing every case vacuously. That guard is what caught this.

requiresPatchedNodePtySourceBuild() in ensure-native-runtime.mjs now covers win32 as well, and pnpm rebuild node-pty sets npm_config_build_from_source so the patched source build actually replaces the upstream prebuild.