Linux generating gigabytes of logs in one session

Question

On my HP Pavilion laptop running Linux Mint 18.3 I'm having the trouble that the system is generating gigabytes of logfiles in just one or two sessions (not longer than half a day each).

The generated, big log files are /var/log/kern.log and /var/log/syslog. They are both filled with the following report:

Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.503777] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Corrected error received: id=00e8
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.503786] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: can't find device of ID00e8
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.503802] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Multiple Corrected error received: id=00e8
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.504154] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, id=00e8(Receiver ID)
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.504158] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0:   device [8086:9d1b] error status/mask=00000001/00002000
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.504162] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0:    [ 0] Receiver Error         (First)
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.504172] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: AER: Corrected error received: id=00e8
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.504180] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0: PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, id=00e8(Receiver ID)
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.504185] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0:   device [8086:9d1b] error status/mask=00000001/00002000
Feb 27 13:54:38 workstation kernel: [  390.504190] pcieport 0000:00:1d.0:    [ 0] Receiver Error         (First)

over and over and over again. This error used to come up at boot but as it didn't seem to affect my everyday-working experience after the booting I suppressed those errors with the pci=nomis added to /etc/default/grub and then running a update-grub.

However I obviously only suppressed the print-out of those error messages as the log is now full with them.

I also tried using logrotate in order to limit the filesize of the log files but that doesn't have any effect as the log file is growing that big in just one session.

Does someone has an idea how I can keep those logfiles to an acceptable size (maybe a few hundred MBs at most)? Because right now I regularly have to delete those logfiles manually in order to keept them from taking up my entire disk space.

EDIT: output of lspci -tv:

-[0000:00]-+-00.0  Intel Corporation Sky Lake Host Bridge/DRAM Registers
           +-02.0  Intel Corporation Sky Lake Integrated Graphics
           +-04.0  Intel Corporation Skylake Processor Thermal Subsystem
           +-14.0  Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP USB 3.0 xHCI Controller
           +-14.2  Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP Thermal subsystem
           +-16.0  Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP CSME HECI
           +-17.0  Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SATA Controller [AHCI mode]
           +-1c.0-[01]----00.0  NVIDIA Corporation GM108M [GeForce 940MX]
           +-1c.4-[02]----00.0  Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS522A PCI Express Card Reader
           +-1c.5-[03]----00.0  Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8101/2/6E PCI Express Fast/Gigabit Ethernet controller
           +-1d.0-[04]----00.0  Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter
           +-1f.0  Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP LPC Controller
           +-1f.2  Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP PMC
           +-1f.3  Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP HD Audio
           \-1f.4  Intel Corporation Sunrise Point-LP SMBus

Answer 1

From your logs, we see a device in PCI 1d.0 is generating a lot of logs.

 pcieport 0000:00:**1d.0**

With the aid of the requested command lspci -tv, we can see it is your realtek device. They are known to be slow, buggy and unreliable.

1d.0-[04]----00.0 Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8723BE PCIe Wireless Network Adapter

As such, I propose as a short term solution, to simply instruct rsyslog to discard all those log/errors.

Configure rsyslog to ignore all those messages, as such:

Add as the first line of your /etc/rsyslog.conf:

:msg, contains, "0000:00:1d.0:" ~

After adding this line, you need to restart the rsyslog service, or otherwise it will only be working in the next reboot.

sudo service rsyslog restart

See Discarding unwanted messages

Note that the statement is placed on top of rsyslog.conf. This makes it being executed before any other action statement. So each message received will be checked against the string and discarded, if a match is found.

As for a long term solution, buy another Wifi PCIe card compatible with the brand and model of your notebook. Realtek is too buggy.

Related: Wi-Fi problems using ASUS USB-N13 adapter

Additional notes:

• 8086:9d1b is your PCI controller;
• I also suggested as a clue to the OP, but it has not solved the question, trying both pci=nomsi and pci=noaer as kernel parameters. See PCIe Bus error severity;
• As the log files rotate, do not forget to delete your old logs, if you do not need to keep historic of logs;
• A possible medium-term solution is using a wifi stick and blacklisting the realtek wifi module;
• I added the [realtek] and [rsyslog] tags to the question.