openssh-agent polling

Damien Miller
Thu, 13 Sep 2007 04:42:54 -0000

On Wed, 12 Sep 2007, Alan Jenkins wrote:

> This may be a stupid question - but why does ssh-agent fork off a
> child and then exec the subcommand in the *parent* process?  It forces
> the agent in the child process to poll the parent, so it can exit when
> the parent finishes.  If the agent was the parent process, it could
> use wait() instead.  I'm sure there's some reason.
>
> It'd be nice to take ssh-agent off the list of polling processes you
> get with powertop[1], however far down it is.

I don't understand what you mean by polling - once started, ssh-agent
spends all its time sitting in select() waiting for requests.

-d