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Who keeps killing gnome-keyring?

· linux gnome-keyring dbus omarchy debugging

At 01:45 one night gnome-keyring-daemon started dying. Not once: every ten to thirty minutes, SIGABRT, a new core dump, a crash notification on the desktop, and everything that had a keyring session open getting “not logged in” errors until it retried. It kept going for the rest of the day, 43 crashes in total.

A password manager had been installed a few hours earlier. It integrates with the system keyring. Case closed, surely.

The setup🔗

Where it died🔗

The core dumps were fully symbolized thanks to debuginfod, and every one of them had the same stack. The daemon was inside service_method_open_session in daemon/dbus/gkd-secret-service.c, finishing a D-Bus OpenSession call. Session negotiation had failed, so it tried to complete the call with a NULL output and a NULL result, and g_variant_new("(@vo)", NULL, ...) is a fatal GLib error. Abort.

Why did negotiation fail? Two assertions earlier in the same crash, in gkd_secret_service_get_pkcs11_session and gkd_secret_service_publish_dispatch, said the daemon had no client record for the D-Bus sender. Client records are created by ensure_client_for_sender, which runs as an idle callback scheduled from the message filter at G_PRIORITY_HIGH. Method dispatch can beat it. A client that connects, sends OpenSession as its first message, and possibly disconnects quickly can have its method handled before the daemon has admitted it exists.

This matched an existing Ubuntu report, bug 2162595, “gnome-keyring 50.0 crashes during concurrent Secret Service access”, where the trigger was a Python package manager running parallel installs. Same version, same abort. So the bug was upstream and known. The question was who on this machine was hammering the Secret Service.

Catching the caller🔗

The password manager was the suspect, but the crashes had a rhythm that did not fit it: 15:00:26, 15:10:26, on the ten-minute mark. That is a poll, not a user.

dbus-monitor on the session bus, filtered to the Secret Service, was running when the 15:10:26 crash landed. The last calls before the abort came from a burst of new connections, each of which opened a fresh bus connection and sent OpenSession("plain") as its very first call. The sender names resolved to processes running the hey command line client for the HEY mail service.

Nobody was running it by hand. The Omarchy bar had a widget installed that morning, the official HEY plugin, added to the shell configuration at 01:36. Nine minutes before the first crash. Its service component refreshes every ten minutes and, on each refresh, spawns several hey processes at once for different queries. Each process probes the keyring on startup. Several simultaneous first-call OpenSession requests on brand new connections is precisely the race the daemon loses.

The password manager was installed at about the same time by coincidence. It was never involved.

Fixing it🔗

Locally: remove the widget from the bar configuration. Crashes stopped at once.

Upstream, two things. The keyring race is a GNOME bug and was already tracked in gnome-keyring issues #183, #190 and #194, one of which has a candidate patch. The trigger was worth reporting to the CLI’s authors, since a tool that talks to the keyring should not need to create a session just to check that the keyring exists. That went to basecamp/hey-cli#352, an existing issue about the same symptom.

The response there was fast. According to the maintainer, the next release changed the startup probe from a create-and-delete test entry to a read-only lookup, tested with two dozen concurrent invocations against gnome-keyring 50.0 without a single daemon restart. That shipped in hey 1.3.1 the following day.

With the CLI updated to 1.4.0 the widget went back into the bar on September 3. Four days later, zero crashes. The daemon is still the same vulnerable 50.0 build, and anything else that opens many concurrent Secret Service sessions would still kill it, but nothing on this machine does anymore.

What I would do differently🔗

Look at the timestamps before looking at the suspects. “It started right after X was installed” is a real signal, but so is “it happens at :00 and :10”, and the second one pointed at the right answer in one step. Both things were installed that night. Only one of them had a ten-minute timer.