periodic reappearance of login prompt

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Tue Mar 28 16:19:42 UTC 2006


On Monday 27 March 2006 1:14 pm, David Clark wrote:
> The basics of my setup are as follows:
> - MPC8245 PowerPC on a custom board
> - Linux Kernel 2.6.14
> - BusyBox 1.00
> - uClibc
>
> I'm having a weird problem in which the login prompt reappears
> automatically and periodically.  There are two scenarios that are very
> repeatable and consistent.
>
> 1.  If I do not login, the login prompt reappears after 80 seconds.
> 2.  If I do login in, the login prompt reappears after 40 second.
>
> This repeats forever.  I have heard of issues involving segmentation
> faults in which busybox silently fails and all the user sees is a new
> login prompt.  This could be a similar issue and obviously it is
> happening in a function that is running on a timer.
>
> Does anybody have any thought or suggestions?
> What busybox functions, if any, run off a timer?

I saw your message on the timesys user list and replied to it there.

Seems like getty is handing off to login immediately, possibly due to the fact 
that you're running all of these suckers on the same terminal as far as init 
is concerned.  You might find 
http://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html#item_init useful.

The login command will time out.  The getty command doesn't.  Either can 
produce the "login:" prompt, depending how the handoff is done.

One easy thing to do if you're rebuilding busybox from source is to stick some 
kind of printf into the start of the login command so you can see when it 
gets kicked off.  If tweaking inittab to run things on the right consoles 
doesn't fix it, I'm guessing the problem is in getty.

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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