glibtop error messages flood ~./xsession-errors

Question

I'm using Debian 9.11 with Cinnamon 3.2.7. The log file at ~/.xsession-errors is flooded pretty much every second with this, repeated over and over:

glibtop(c=1250): [WARNING] Failed to open "/sys/class/net/ttyUSB0/statistics/rx_packets": No such file or directory
glibtop(c=1250): [WARNING] Failed to open "/sys/class/net/ttyUSB0/statistics/tx_packets": No such file or directory
glibtop(c=1250): [WARNING] Failed to open "/sys/class/net/ttyUSB0/statistics/rx_bytes": No such file or directory
glibtop(c=1250): [WARNING] Failed to open "/sys/class/net/ttyUSB0/statistics/tx_bytes": No such file or directory
glibtop(c=1250): [WARNING] Failed to open "/sys/class/net/ttyUSB0/statistics/rx_errors": No such file or directory
glibtop(c=1250): [WARNING] Failed to open "/sys/class/net/ttyUSB0/statistics/tx_errors": No such file or directory
glibtop(c=1250): [WARNING] Failed to open "/sys/class/net/ttyUSB0/statistics/collisions": No such file or directory

Is this something to worry about? How do I get rid of this log spam? I don't know if it's causing any actual issues, but it's always better to be safe.

Answer 1

I had very similar warnings. I realized that I was asking the xfce "hardware monitor" to pull info from a device -- in my case it's an ethernet interface. Removing the corresponding entry in the monitoring tool configuration stopped printing the warnings.

Answer 2

It happened to me with a USB-C wifi dongle. The problem is that somehow the software that collects the new Network's device stats, is reading the stats files from /sys/ before it has finished loading the activation process.

I run Mint 21 and all I had to do, was restart the NetworkManager:

sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager

Here's my distro info:

Distributor ID: Linuxmint
Description:    Linux Mint 21
Release:    21
Codename:   vanessa
Linux afg7 5.15.0-52-generic #58-Ubuntu SMP Thu Oct 13 08:03:55 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux