Why so many 'agent' processes run by xfce4-session

[Chris Green]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2020 at 10:04:23AM +0100, Chris Green wrote:
> I have been doing some ssh configuration recently and, as a
> consequence, looked at the key agent processes related to Public Key
> handling.
> 
> On both my xubuntu 20.04 systems I have three agent processes, is this
> correct (output from ps):-
> 
> chris       1136     965  0 Sep16 ?        00:00:02 xfce4-session
> chris 1223 1136 0 Sep16 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/im-launch startxfce4 
> chris 1524 1136 0 Sep16 ? 00:00:01 /usr/lib/policykit-1-gnome/polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1 
> chris 1898 1133 0 Sep16 ? 00:00:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent -D -a /run/user/1000/keyring/.ssh 
> 
> 
> Should all of these really be running, if not then how do I turn some
> of them off?  It seems that it's the ssh-agent process 1898 which is
> the actual key agent process.
> 
Not to mention that the two ssh-agent processes seem to be competing:-

chris$ env | grep -i ssh
SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/user/1000/keyring/ssh
SSH_AGENT_PID=1223


-- 
Chris Green