Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 101525
X on Toshiba laptop logs "PM Event received: Power Status Change"
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:56:34 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030314 Description of problem: XFree86 (or possibly xdm) on a Toshiba Satellite 4090XDVD writes the message "(II) PM Event received: Power Status Change" to /var/log/XFree86.0.log with annoying frequency. It actually causes the hard disc to become so involved with attemtping to write the log, that other applications (even X itself) become unresponsive for several seconds at a time. Google search generates hits where people think it's a problem with xdm (my laptop does indeed boot to init level 5). One Google hit stated that this issue is related to the kernel reporting different minutes of battery time left. In fact, when watching /proc/apm the battery minutes fluctuate between 141 minutes and 146 minutes, even when on AC power. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): XFree86-4.2.1-13.73.3, XFree86-xdm-4.2.1-13.73.3 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Happens whenever X runs (only tested in init level 5). Additional info:
XFree86 logs to the log file things that X developers find useful or require in order to debug the server for various problems. This includes things like power events, as such are useful to developers for debugging problems. It is entirely possible for things outside the control of XFree86 to generate events that cause the X server to log them to the log file and fill up disk space over time. The default X server log messages, and verbosity, are intended not for end user convenience, but rather for developer convenience when problems arise. Under normal working conditions, this works fine for both developers and end users. However, end users who have problematic hardware, misconfigured hardware or software, or software which conflicts with the X server and might cause excessive data items to be logged are certainly possible. It sounds to me, like the cause of your problem is either faulty hardware, or possibly a kernel bug which causes excessive APM events to be sent to the X server. Changing the X server to not log this information is not the solution, as that just hides the problem and does not solve it. It also would make power events no longer log in the log file and thus become invisible to developers troubleshooting log files. The proper solution, is to figure out what is the _cause_ of the problem rather than bandaiding over the side effects that are caused by the problematic system. I will not remove these messages from the X server, nor change the default verbosity of the X server, as it is set for developer preference, and under normal circumstances, that is not a problem. You may however wish to work around the log file side effect problem by changing the verbosity of the server on your own system by using the -logverbose option documented in the Xserver or XFree86 manpage. That will allow you to ignore the messages, however the generated log files are less useful to developers who might be looking at your log files trying to diagnose this or other problems. The true solution to the problem is to find out the real cause of the misreported events, and then fix that. That might be a faulty kernel module, or faulty hardware. Either way, this isn't an XFree86 bug, so I'm closing it NOTABUG. Also, as a side note, we no longer support Red Hat Linux 8.0 (as of Dec 31, 2003), and so I recommend upgrading your OS to Fedora Core 1, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. If the problem you are encountering is kernel related, it's possible the new OS release may solve or workaround this issue for you. Closing as 'NOTABUG'