Is it normal to have two running wpa_supplicants?

Question

I'm trying to debug issues with wifi connectivity of my RPi 3 (it just randomly loses connection sometimes). And I noticed that

ps aux | grep wpa_supplicant gives me:

root       310  0.0  0.4  10708  3636 ?        Ss   lut16   0:00 /sbin/wpa_supplicant -u -s -O /run/wpa_supplicant
root       397  0.0  0.4  11080  3140 ?        Ss   lut16   0:01 wpa_supplicant -B -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -iwlan0 -Dnl80211,wext

I'm using a minimal Raspbian Buster and the only thing that I've done is that I configured the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:

ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev
update_config=1
country=PL

network={
        ssid="[MyExtender]"
        bssid=[MyExtendersMac]
        psk=""
}

Is it normal?

If yes - then why there are two instances of wpa_supplicant?

If no - how to get rid of one?

Answer 1

there are two instances of wpa_supplicant?

The first command is called by the wpa_supplicant.service,see :

systemctl cat wpa_supplicant.service

The second one is executed manually:

wpa_supplicant -B -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -iwlan0 -Dnl80211,wext

Multiple wpa_supplicant instances to configure the same network interface may conflict, to stop them, run:

killall wpa_supplicant

or:

killall wpasupplicant

Then cleanly start a new instance manually.