Things on this page are fragmentary and immature notes/thoughts of the author. Please read with your own judgement!

Note: You might have to do this every time you upgrade your Linux kernel!!

Symptoms

Below are step-by-step symptoms from superficial to root causes.

1. Your Linux system becomes very slow even if the system has enough CPU and memory resources.

2. top reports a large portion of CPU wating on IO.

3. sudo iotop reports jbd2 using lots of disk IO.

4. The command ls -lhS /var/log/*log | head shows a few obviously large log files. Generally speaking, a log file in MBs is considered large.

5. A large log file shows frequent error/warning messages. For example, The kernel log file /var/log/kern.log shows the following error message frequently.

   PCIe-Bus-Error:-severity=Corrected,-type=Physical-Layer

A faster alternative way to check whether your machine is experiencing this issue is to directly search for the keyword PCIe-Bus-Error in log files.

ls /var/log/*log | xargs grep PCI-Bus-Error

If you see lots of occurences of the following line, then your machine is likely experiencing the issue.

PCIe-Bus-Error:-severity=Corrected,-type=Physical-Layer

Solution

1. Empty large log files. Taking /var/log/kern.log as an example, you can empty it using the following command. Notice that you'd better NOT remove log files.

   cat /dev/null | sudo tee /var/log/kern.log
   

2. Edit the GRUB file /etc/default/grub to add the pci=nomsi parameter to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT directive.

3. Update the GRUB.

   sudo update-grub
   

4. If the above steps does not fix the issue, try repeating steps 2-3 with other parameters, e.g., pci=noaer or pci=mmconf.

References

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

• Troubleshooting PCIe Bus Error severity Corrected on Ubuntu and Linux Mint

• Issues with "PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected" errors? [partially SOLVED]