Re: What is agetty, and why can't it be stopped?

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net>]

On 6/5/19 11:15 PM, David Wright wrote:

> On Wed 05 Jun 2019 at 22:43:53 (-0400), Felix Miata wrote:
> > Gene Heskett composed on 2019-06-05 22:04 (UTC-0400):
> >
> > > root@coyote:~$ locate agetty
> > > /sbin/agetty
> > Maybe this will be a useful clue:
> >
> > In Stretch, any gettys running on vtty[1-6] are actually agettys.
> > Files in /etc/systemd/system/getty.target.wants/ are symlinks to:
> > 	/lib/systemd/system/getty@service
> > # ps -A | grep get
> >   1021 tty3     00:00:00 agetty
> >   1022 tty4     00:00:00 agetty
> >   1023 tty2     00:00:00 agetty
> >   1451 tty1     00:00:00 agetty
> >   3932 tty6     00:00:00 agetty
> > 12733 tty5     00:00:00 agetty
> >
> > Why all this would tie up the serial port I don't know.

Depends on how the serial port is configured.  It's pretty standard for 
it to be set up as a console, by default, in which case an instance of 
getty would be running waiting for a user to login.

Miles Fidelman