This directory contains Chrome Platform Services. If you think of Chrome as a "portable OS," Chrome Platform Services can be thought of as that OS' "system services".
Roughly each subdirectory here corresponds to a service that:
- is a client of
//services/shell
with its own unique Identity. - could logically run a standalone process for security/performance isolation benefits depending on the constraints of the host OS.
Individual services are structured like so:
//services/foo/ <-- Implementation code, may have subdirs.
/public/
/cpp/ <-- C++ client libraries (optional)
/interfaces/ <-- Mojom interfaces
Code within //services
may only depend on each other via each other's
/public/
directories, i.e. implementation code cannot be shared directly.
Service code should also take care to tightly limit the dependencies on static
libraries from outside of //services
. Dependencies to large platform
layers like //content
, //chrome
or //third_party/WebKit
must be avoided.
Note that while it may be possible to build a discrete physical package (DSO) for each service, products consuming these services may package them differently, e.g. by combining them into a single package.