Arch Linux

pgoetz

Member

From: Austin, Texas

Registered: 2014-02-21

Posts: 341

Mate Desktop: System -> Log Out User isn't fully logging people out

The most recent Firefox updates (63.0.x and 64.0) appear to have destabilized my formerly rock solid Mate system, which is now freezing regularly, requiring that Firefox be quit, and then waiting until it crashes in the background or until I  kill -9 the firefox parent process.

In the process of attempting to debug this, I noticed that Mate logout isn't actually logging people out.  I share my desktop through user switching with other people who generally log in for a specific task and then log out again.  I'm currently the only one logged in, but when I run htop I notice one of the top processes is sd-pam for a user not currently logged in.  Also multiple instances of  /usr/bin/python /usr/share/system-config-printer/applet.py, multiple /usr/lib/dconf-service (in this case, 3 for me and 3 for a user not logged in), many /usr/lib/gvfsd-fuse|-metadata|-trash processes, and so on.

I'm pretty sure this is a bug I need to report to upstream, but any thoughts?

schard

Forum Moderator

From: Hannover

Registered: 2016-05-06

Posts: 1,975

Website

Re: Mate Desktop: System -> Log Out User isn't fully logging people out

Logging out of a DE does not generally imply killing all the respective user's processes.
It depends on how they were started. There are e.g. systemd units on user level that may continue to run or Cron jobs.

Last edited by schard (2018-12-12 17:53:25)

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macro_rules! yolo { { $($tokens:tt)* } => { unsafe { $($tokens)* } }; }

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,321

Re: Mate Desktop: System -> Log Out User isn't fully logging people out

See also KillUserProcesses in `man 5 logind.conf`

pgoetz

Member

From: Austin, Texas

Registered: 2014-02-21

Posts: 341

Re: Mate Desktop: System -> Log Out User isn't fully logging people out

Logging out of a DE does not generally imply killing all the respective user's processes.

Understood.  However there are no user-level systemd or cron processes on this system.  All the stuff I mentioned should go away on logout, as far as I can tell.  It's particularly worrisome when some user who has logged out but has an sd-pam process running that is consuming the most resources, according to htop.

pgoetz

Member

From: Austin, Texas

Registered: 2014-02-21

Posts: 341

Re: Mate Desktop: System -> Log Out User isn't fully logging people out

See also KillUserProcesses in `man 5 logind.conf`

Thanks for that tip!  This might be the ticket to solving this issue.  On my system there is a /etc/systemd/logind.conf file rather than a /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/ directory, as per the logind.conf man page (and standard systemd protocol), but I'm going to try editing this file first.