Mining Tutorials, Ubuntu Linux

PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer,
id=00e6(Receiver ID)

Step-By-Step How to Fix

For the impatient the solution is to remove the files clogging your hardrive and then edit the grub file to add the pci-nomsi parameter to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT directive. Here’s how you do this:

  1. Remove the logs and their archives that are using up drive space*: 
    $ cd /var && sudo rm -vf syslog* && rm -vf kern*
    Note: The above command executes a verbose(v) and forced(f) delete on the archived log files. But, in the sys-admin community it’s generally agreed that it’s better to empty live log files than to delete them. So, $ sudo cat /dev/null > /var/log/kern.log and $ cat /dev/null > /var/log/syslog are best practices.
  2. Edit the grub file and add the pci=nomsi parameter: 
    $ sudo nano /etc/default/grub
    Now, find this line: 
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amdgpu.vm_fragment_size=9"
    And change it to this line: 
    GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash pci=nomsi amdgpu.vm_fragment_size=9"
  3. Save and Exit nano. Then update grub: 
    $ sudo update-grub

Overview

We noticed this error on our second mining rig which runs on an Asus Prime Z270-A on an Intel Celeron G3930 processor. You’ll want to get this error fixed as it will quickly consume hard drive space. The space will be consumed with multi-gigabyte logs replete with these error messages.

For the curious, feel free explore the theoretical causes for this error on the linux kernel mail-list board. One theory is this error is caused by a hardware issue between the wireless adapter and a PCI-E port.

Detailed Diagnosis

Your kern.log and syslog (and their respective archives) will be filled with “Error Spam”. The kern.log is written to during system boot. The syslog is continuously written to and thus will consume the most space. The error messages will contain text akin to PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected, type=Physical Layer, id=00e6(Receiver ID).

Pinpoint which files are consuming the most hard drive space via:

$ sudo du -cha --max-depth=1 / | grep -E "^[0-9\.]*[MG]" | sort -rh
Where:
 -h: output human readable numbers (e.g., 2K 1G)
-r: reverse sort (largest to smallest)

References

  • No more disk space: How can I find what is taking up the space?
  • How can I sort du -h output by size
  • pci=nomsi -What does it do?
  • https://askubuntu.com/questions/863150/pcie-bus-error-severity-corrected-type-physical-layer-id-00e5receiver-id pcie_aspm=off
  • https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Software-and-How-To-Questions/Error-Spam-AER-id-00e5-PCIe-Bus-Error-severity-Corrected/td-p/5933687
  • Similar to above but also suggests adding pci=noaer to your kernel command line https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1521173