[Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

dransem · 2026-01-28 16:32:48

Hey, arch newbie here !

I have freshly installed arch on my laptop with systemd-boot as bootloader and KDE as desktop environment.

At boot, in the middle of common systemd outputs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#/ … fedora.svg), I notice 3 warnings (or what looks like it, orange colored lines).

It seems quite obscure to me, I don't find much about these online. Should I keep trying to fix them ? Or will I be fine letting it as it is ? Everything seems to work well otherwise at first sight (even bluetooth).

Here is the first warning :

 faux_driver regulatory: Direct firmware load for regulatory.db failed with error -2

I managed to get rid of that first one thanks to this section : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Networ … ory_domain

I just installed wireless-regdb package and ran iw reg get command, but I did not really understand why it worked.

2nd warning :

  kvm_amd: [Firmware Bug]: Cannot enable x2AVIC, AVIC is unsupported

3rd warning :

  Bluetooth: hci0: HCI Enhanced Setup Synchronous Connection command is advertised, but not supported.

Last edited by dransem (2026-02-06 14:28:36)

Lone_Wolf · 2026-01-28 17:16:00

One issue per topic please.

I'll focus on the 2nd warning as that one is the simplest.

AVIC stands for Advanced Virtual Interrupt Controller which is a special technique to improve performance on Virtual Machines.

In case your processor/motherboard combo supports AVIC this warning is bad. If your processor doesn't support it, its an expected message.
Typically AVIC is found on enterprise/server class hardware, not on consumer hw .

What is the brand & model of your motherboard and processor ?
(if you have a prebuilt system, post brand & model of the whole system)

dransem · 2026-01-28 17:40:28

Thank you, I understand the 1 topic 1 issue rule, but my main question here was about this type of warnings in general. How should I deal with them ? How can I understand how important they are and be sure it does not mean I have done something wrong ? Now and in the future of my Arch journey.

I have copy-pasted the 3 I have encountered as illustration, even I appreciate specific help about them if it is quick enough of course. If I had got 15 of them, creating 15 topics would have been a bit too much I guess.

Last edited by dransem (2026-01-29 17:39:21)

V1del · 2026-01-28 19:07:21

Many kind of messages in the kernel are mostly of informational value. E.g. the BT message get's invoked because the hardware does claim to support something that doesn't actually work when the kernel tries to make use of it. The regulatory message gets invoked because without the regdb package it can literally not load the regdb data for your firmware and the HW will be stuck with whatever defaults are on the chip (which in most cases is sufficient either way). Unless you notice something actively not working and have strong reason to believe any correlation with a given message you can mostly ignore them.

In some older versions of the kernel you were almost guaranteed to see scary red error messages about ACPI features being unavailable on any given motherboard, but those are ultimately just the kernel telling you that the MB advertised some feature that was not actually implemented when the kernel tried to invoke it. For the majority of cases this info was and is absolutely harm- and meaningless, which is why it was eventually relegated to debug output you'll only see once you're actively going to look for it.

Generally there's a lot of HW that does the bare minimum to make sure windows boots and common consumer usecases look like they're working and sometimes have left overs that the kernel will tell you about if it tries to invoke certain functionality that's being advertised one way or another.

dransem · 2026-01-28 22:59:39

Ok thanks, it's already quite much clearer to me ! So it seems there not much to worry about.

Would it be a bad practice to try to silence these messages to make my boot look cleaner ?

Lone_Wolf · 2026-01-29 09:16:04

The kernel uses console_loglevel to deternine which messages will be shown.
man syslog 2 has details .

run

$ cat /proc/sys/kernel/printk

to get the current level.

The default for the first number is 4, if you prefer less messages you could set it to 3 so only level 1 & 2 messages are shown .

To change loglevel to 3 permanently you need to set it at boot by adding loglevel=3 to your boot command line.
Where/how to add that depends on your chosen bootloader.

dransem · 2026-01-29 15:27:39

Thanks ! I get it.

I have found in the systemd-boot documentation that its default log level is "info", which could explain why I see these messages.

They are still displayed after trying to add

log-level emerg

in my loader.conf file though. I keep searching.

dransem · 2026-01-29 16:28:47

I figured it out.

I managed to filter the messages displayed at boot my editing the log level in my arch entry file (ESP/loader/entries/arch.conf) rather than in the systemd-boot loader.conf file

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.14/a … eters.html

Lone_Wolf · 2026-01-30 17:33:57

Glad you found it, for reference here's the link to the latest kernel doc : https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/ker … eters.html

In case you are satisfied with the result, please prepend [Solved] to the thread title (edit first post).

Arch Linux

#1 2026-01-28 16:32:48

[Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

#2 2026-01-28 17:16:00

Re: [Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

#3 2026-01-28 17:40:28

Re: [Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

#4 2026-01-28 19:07:21

Re: [Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

#5 2026-01-28 22:59:39

Re: [Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

#6 2026-01-29 09:16:04

Re: [Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

#7 2026-01-29 15:27:39

Re: [Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

#8 2026-01-29 16:28:47

Re: [Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

#9 2026-01-30 17:33:57

Re: [Solved] Should I be concerned about systemd warnings ?

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