per-connection sshd doesn't always pass on SIGQUIT

[Bob Proulx]

Philippe Cerfon wrote:
> When having a SSH connection, than it seems there may be two sshd
> processes for that, one running as root the other as the user. As far
> as I know this is because of privilege separation, like e.g.:
> ├─sshd(2931)─┬─sshd(10174)───bash(10180)
> │            └─sshd(10000)───sshd(10050,someuser)───sleep(10051)
>
> When sending INT, TERM, QUIT or HUB to the 1st process (10000), than
> the second get the same (sent by the 1st) except for the case of QUIT.
> Plus the same behavior with the remote command (here sleep) as above,
> depending on RequestTTY (but of course, not working in the QUIT case,
> as the 2nd process doesn't get that).
>
> Is there any reason why it passes on all these signals but not QUIT?
> Or is the perhaps a bug?

I don't know the original author's intent with sshd but the main
purpose of the SIGQUIT is to cause the process to dump a core image
for debugging.  The core image can then be used to debug the state of
the program.  For example if the program appeared to be stuck in an
infinite loop then the core image would allow one to deduce this
mapping the program state back to the program source and allow
inspecting the value of variables at the time.

The traditional name for core was "core".  For the most part these
days we set it to be "core.$$" types of names with the process ID in
the file name so that multiple processes would have uniquely named
core files.  But on a traditional "core" type of system then the last
one dumped would be the one still left on the file system.

Does it really make sense to pass along SIGQUIT such that instead of
one core file from the program you are targeting with SIGQUIT to get
a debugging core that there would be a chain of core files from each
of the programs where the signal was forwarded to?  That doesn't feel
like it makes sense to me.  How would that be useful?

Bob

P.S. Note that most systems now have the core ulimit set to disable
writing core dumps to the file system.  Because these were often left
due to program bugs that only the developer with source could debug
but that the user did not care about.  Meaning that today in order to
obtain a core file these days one must enable the ulimit value of it
first.