Excessive logging of CPU throttling due to temperature fills up entire root partition

[Scott Ritchie]

Binary package hint: sysklogd

I experienced applications crashing randomly that used to work: the root cause turned out to be they were unable to make new temp files due to my root partition being full.

My root partition became full because, in the span of a single hour, /var/log/syslog managed to grow to hundreds of megabytes in size. The reason was hundreds of thousands of warnings like this: "[20889.416599] CPU1: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 1038592)"

This is a specific case of a more general problem with log file size (described here https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sysklogd/+bug/298140) -- logrotate is unable to solve this, however, because the file grows so large so fast that logrotate won't shrink it in time (I believe logrotate only runs once a day by default).

As a simple fix for karmic, I would suggest a check that prevented this particular error message from getting out of hand: say, only logging every thousandth CPU temperature warning.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Oct 17 06:15:32 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: sysklogd (not installed)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: sysklogd
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic x86_64
XsessionErrors:
 (gnome-settings-daemon:4354): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (gnome-settings-daemon:4354): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_propagate_error: assertion `src != NULL' failed
 (polkit-gnome-authentication-agent-1:4461): GLib-CRITICAL **: g_once_init_leave: assertion `initialization_value != 0' failed
 (nautilus:4443): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed
 (nautilus:5931): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed

[rob_brown-bayliss (r-brown-bayliss-deactivatedaccount)]

I have same messages, but only AFTER evolution has been started. until then it is fine, but run evolutio nad CPU is maxed out.