Comment 15 for bug 151440

Further info:

This happens even if I start my "tail -f" process or "read -t 1" loop within a chroot environment running a completely different distro, under an Ubuntu 18.04 terminal. The distro in question (really a custom from-scratch distro) has never had this problem when running as the real root distro.

So the root cause of this problem is likely something low-level: either the terminal emulator or the system kernel.