Bug 74114

Summary:	Hundreds of dbus-daemon processes
Product:	dbus	Reporter:	Marc Girod <marc.girod>
Component:	core	Assignee:	Havoc Pennington <hp>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME	QA Contact:
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium
Version:	1.4.x
Hardware:	Other
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Marc Girod 2014-01-27 11:51:05 UTC

I find a growing number of root owned dbus-daemon processes.
Eventually, this results in a 'too many processes' error preventing something to fork, e.g. a login.

They get created by batches of 4, every 30 minutes on my box.
My box is a puppet client, so that these 30 minutes are not in a local cron tab.
The pids are 11 units apart (when the box is otherwise idle).
The command line is:
//bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session

~> uname -srv
Linux 3.2.0-58-generic #88-Ubuntu SMP Tue Dec 3 17:37:58 UTC 2013
~> aptitude show dbus
Package: dbus
State: installed
Automatically installed: no
Multi-Arch: foreign
Version: 1.4.18-1ubuntu1.4
Priority: standard
Section: devel
Maintainer: Ubuntu Developers <ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com>
Architecture: amd64
Uncompressed Size: 953 k
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.14), libdbus-1-3 (>= 1.0.2), libexpat1 (>= 1.95.8),
         libselinux1 (>= 1.32), upstart-job, adduser, lsb-base (>= 3.2-14),
         upstart (>= 0.6.3-6), netbase (>= 4.45ubuntu3)
Suggests: dbus-x11
Conflicts: dbus
Provides: dbus
Provided by: dbus
Description: simple interprocess messaging system (daemon and utilities)
 
Homepage: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/

Comment 1 Marc Girod 2014-01-27 12:06:22 UTC

~# ps -fu root | grep dbus-daemon | grep -v grep | tail -8
root     17509     1  0 11:25 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
root     17520     1  0 11:25 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
root     17531     1  0 11:25 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
root     17542     1  0 11:25 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
root     17972     1  0 11:55 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
root     17983     1  0 11:55 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
root     17994     1  0 11:55 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
root     18005     1  0 11:55 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session

Comment 2 Simon McVittie 2014-01-27 14:23:11 UTC

Please report this to your distribution, which appears to be Ubuntu. dbus 1.4 is no longer supported upstream, except for security vulnerabilities.

There are some Ubuntu-specific patches in their dbus package, I don't know whether those have any effect here.

(In reply to comment #1)
> ~# ps -fu root | grep dbus-daemon | grep -v grep | tail -8
> root     17509     1  0 11:25 ?        00:00:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork
> --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session

The symptoms you described probably mean that something running as root is either running /usr/bin/dbus-launch, or attempting to access a D-Bus session via the autolaunch: transport while under a transient X11 session, 4 times every 30 minutes.

If this machine does not intentionally run an X11 GUI or a D-Bus session, uninstalling the dbus-x11 package or making /usr/bin/dbus-launch non-executable might work around this. Don't do that if you use an X11 GUI environment, though.

Since 1.4.8, dbus autolaunch has only been effective when DISPLAY is set and non-empty, so if this is autolaunch, an X11 session must be involved somehow.

Comment 3 Simon McVittie 2014-04-28 15:11:02 UTC

Resolving as WORKSFORME; please reopen if you have evidence that this is a D-Bus bug and that it still exists in a supported version.

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