This is actually a mingetty without the printfs.
Why?  Because then you can link it against dietlibc
(http://www.fefe.de/dietlibc/).

Actually, diet libc now supports printf, but not using it makes binaries
smaller nonetheless.

The difference is remarkable:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM   VSZ  RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root      5487  0.0  0.1  1180  444 tty5     S    00:40   0:00 /sbin/mingetty tty5
root      6035  0.0  0.0    16   16 tty5     S    00:45   0:00 /sbin/getty tty5