Arch Linux

scott_fakename

Member

Registered: 2012-08-15

Posts: 93

laptop-mode causing unresponsive ttys or cryptic error messages

I installed laptop-mode-tools at the same time I installed arch by following the wiki. For a long time it worked great.

A few months ago, however, I started noticing strange messages showing up in the stream of text that shows when you boot up (tells the state of fsck for example). It would say occassionally, "enabled, not active" in that stream, and when it did that, at the login for tty1 it would say "Failed." where you should type in your username, and then another line that also said "Failed."

Like this:

Arch Linux 3.10.3-1-ARCH (tty1)

Hint: Num Lock on

destruct-o-bot login: Failed.
Failed.

It would let you type in your username blind though when that happened and it would all work fine.

Other times you would see the "enabled, not active" message and when it came time to log in to tty1, it would flicker briefly and then go blank and remain unresponsive. So I would switch to tty2, and the same thing could (but might not always) happen, and so on through tty3-tty6.

I finally tracked it down to being laptop mode tools. Here is what it prints out when I run systemctl start laptop-mode.service:

/usr/share/laptop-mode-tools/modules/pcie-aspm: line 10: echo: write error: Operation not permitted
Failed.
Failed.

and here is what it prints out on tty1 when I run systemctl stop laptop-mode.service:

disabled, not active
/usr/share/laptop-mode-tools/modules/pcie-aspm: line 10: echo: write error: Operation not permitted
disabled, not active

Those two things exactly correspond to the lines of output when I'm booting up or shutting down. And when I disable laptop-mode.service, no more problems.

I can't find anything about this problem online. How can I fix it? Has anyone else ever heard of these issues?

demaio

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 101

Website

Re: laptop-mode causing unresponsive ttys or cryptic error messages

It looks like your problem may be related to this one:

FS#33324 - [laptop-mode-tools] use journal instead of tty

scott_fakename

Member

Registered: 2012-08-15

Posts: 93

Re: laptop-mode causing unresponsive ttys or cryptic error messages

It looks related. I'm not really worried about the messages, per se, though. If that were all it did, I would just ignore it. WHat I'm bothered by is the terminals that don't work.

# journalctl -b | tail -30
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot slim[542]: (II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty2...
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty2.
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: getty@tty2.service holdoff time over, scheduling restart.
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Stopping Getty on tty2...
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty2...
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty2.
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: getty@tty2.service holdoff time over, scheduling restart.
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Stopping Getty on tty2...
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty2...
Aug 04 10:24:09 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty2.
Aug 04 10:24:10 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty3...
Aug 04 10:24:10 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty3.
Aug 04 10:24:10 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: getty@tty3.service holdoff time over, scheduling restart.
Aug 04 10:24:10 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Stopping Getty on tty3...
Aug 04 10:24:10 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty3...
Aug 04 10:24:10 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty3.
Aug 04 10:24:11 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty4...
Aug 04 10:24:11 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty4.
Aug 04 10:24:11 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: getty@tty4.service holdoff time over, scheduling restart.
Aug 04 10:24:11 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Stopping Getty on tty4...
Aug 04 10:24:11 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty4...
Aug 04 10:24:11 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty4.
Aug 04 10:24:12 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty5...
Aug 04 10:24:12 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty5.
Aug 04 10:24:13 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Starting Getty on tty6...
Aug 04 10:24:13 destruct-o-bot systemd[1]: Started Getty on tty6.
Aug 04 10:24:22 destruct-o-bot slim[542]: (II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch
Aug 04 10:24:29 destruct-o-bot sudo[1949]: scott : TTY=tty1 ; PWD=/home/scott ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/bin/journalctl -b
Aug 04 10:24:29 destruct-o-bot sudo[1949]: pam_unix(sudo:session): session opened for user root by scott(uid=0)

See all the times on tty2 that it tried to restart? Then it ultimately failed. tty3 restarted a couple times too, but it didn't fail.

This behaviour doesn't occur without laptop-mode. I just was hoping to see if this was a known bug... I can't see why these two services would be interrelated at all. It doesn't look like it so I might just have to file a bug report.

Time will tell.

Last edited by scott_fakename (2013-08-04 15:33:35)