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The problem

Back in Sep 2023, after a dist-upgrade on ubuntu 22.04, nouveau started to spam my journal with an excessive number of fifo: CACHE_ERROR entries.

Here is one documented session that saw 168128 spam entries in 192 minutes (that's about 876 entries per minute):

$ sudo journalctl -b | grep 'nouveau.*fifo' | head -n1
Sep 03 12:29:02 *** kernel: nouveau 0000:00:05.0: fifo: CACHE_ERROR - ch 0 [kworker/0:0[7]] subc 2 mthd 012c data 00000000
$ 
$ sudo journalctl -b | grep 'nouveau.*fifo' | tail -n1
Sep 03 15:40:56 *** kernel: nouveau 0000:00:05.0: fifo: CACHE_ERROR - ch 0 [kworker/0:0[7]] subc 2 mthd 0130 data 00000000
$ 
$ sudo journalctl -b | grep 'nouveau.*fifo' | wc -l
168128

As the result, the journal became almost entirely spam and could not be viewed without grep -v, not to mention the annoyance of constant IO and disk noise.

Unfortunately, it seemed that the only relevant and officially supported solution for filtering the journal before saving is PR #24058 which added LogIncludeRegex= and LogExcludeRegex= for per unit filtering, and which only came after a lengthy discussion spanning more than five years.

This solution yet to be available on my ubuntu wasn't even going to solve the problem I was dealing with: spam coming from the kernel.

I did not want to turn off /dev/kmsg ingestion entirely, so I had to come up with my own solution.

The solution

jksf starts early in the boot process (with the help of jksf.service), reads from /dev/kmsg, runs the filters defined in /etc/jksf-rules.conf, and prints out the result which then gets recorded by journald.

To use jksf:

  • set ReadKMsg=no in /etc/systemd/journald.conf to prevent journald from ingesting /dev/kmsg
  • place jksf under /usr/local/sbin/
  • place jksf.service under /etc/systemd/system/
  • write filtering rules (see below) and save them in /etc/jksf-rules.conf
  • reboot to see jksf do its work

/dev/kmsg entries that pass through the filter should now appear in the journal as logged by "jksf", and entries filtered out are dumped into /dev/shm/jksf-dump. Once you are comfortable that nothing valuable is lost, you can remove the -d /dev/shm/jksf-dump option from the ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/jksf line in jksf.service so that no spam gets saved even temporarily.

If you need to adjust the filtering rules, simply edit /etc/jksf-rules.conf and restart jksf.service.

Iterative Inclusion Exclusion (IIE) Filter

IIE is a natural extension of the algorithm in PR #24058 Since it may actually be a novel idea, some explanation is due.

There are two types of IIE rules: inclusion and exclusion.

Each rule starts with either i for an inclusion rule or e for an exclusion rule, followed by at least one space, followed by a python regex enclosed between two slashes.

As an example, my /etc/jksf-rules.conf for dealing with the nouveau spam problem contains just this line:

e /nouveau.*CACHE_ERROR/

The IIE algorithm evaluates a list of rules as follows:

  • Before applying rule-0, the initial state is set to the opposite of the rule type, ie., "exclude" for an inclusion rule, and "include" otherwise;
  • If before applying rule-n the state is the opposite of the rule type, it's negated iff the rule matches;
  • Otherwise, rule-n is simply ignored;
  • After all the rules have been considered, the final state determines whether the item is included or excluded.