tl;dr version:

On current, the last character in a username (on the login prompt) refuses to be deleted (on occasion). Edit: I'm assuming its a keyboard issue but I guess I do not really know what the issue is.

Full version:

So someone ended up wrecking my Macbook pro and as a result buying me a new computer. What I ended up with was a "Dell" "Inspiron 15 5565". My data survived in tact and I booted the Slackware installer so I could get my old kernel to boot. Since the machine uses an AMD GPU I quickly thought it would be wise to move over to the 4.9.x series kernel since that is what is being used in current. Then I wanted to work with vulkan... in short order I ended up little by little moving over to some parts of current; and finally just said, "the heck with it! I'll just move to current". I've tested the machine with current and with 14.2 (+ a few driver updates and the 4.9.x series kernel). I noticed on current (this only happens on current) that once in a while at the terminal log in screen if I mistype a username that I am logging into, it refuse to delete the last character; I'm not sure what could be causing this. The issue does not really effect me enough to matter and I realize I'm on current and bugs are to be expected; however, I thought I would make a note of it here.

You can trigger it with control characters. Start typing a login, then a control character like ctrl-h (note: on the console that's not backspace). then try backspacing over it. You can't clear the input field completely You can however use ctrl-u to completely clear the input, but it's not reflected on screen.

I might try rebuilding agetty a little later and see if that helps.

update: I didn't bother doing a rebuild. I noticed in the changelog that util-linux is pretty new, so it's possibly something that got broken with this update. I noticed there are lots of terminal/ncurses related changes in this release. https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/uti...2.30-ChangeLog


I tried using getty_ps instead, but that behaves even worse.

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Actually, I was wrong above, it's far more basic. It's got nothing to do with the control characters (though those certainly do upset it). I can enter two normal characters and then try and backspace over them and it will only backspace the first.

Worth noting: after the first attempt at entering a username /bin/login gains control of the tty so agetty only handles the first attempt at inputting a login name and that seems to be where the problem is. Once /bin/login gains control it works perfectly.

Ok, this is the culprit:
https://github.com/karelzak/util-lin...a54b2aeb355b20

I just rebuilt util-linux reverting it and its associated typo fix (9ff67eb9c88298f5e47007c56724aa102a1623ac) and the problem went away.


Logged issue with upstream:
https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/issues/454


In the mean time, here's a patch to the slackbuild to revert it.

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This is now fixed in upstream git master, so we should see it go away with the next util-linux update (whenever that ships).

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