systemd-journald could be ruining your PC

When using my laptop with Arch Linux on it, I always thought it was normal that the fans would go wild, until I booted into Windows again to do some stuff and heard barely any noise.

After I went back to Arch to see what was up, I launched htop and saw that systemd-journald (the process responsible for logs) was using 100% of an entire CPU core. I figured the logging facility shouldn’t do that. Curiously I typed journalctl -xe at the terminal… and there were tens of thousands of messages talking about “correctable PCI bus errors” and hundreds about how those errors were coming in so fast that the journal couldn’t process them.

Looking this up, I found some boot flag (pci=noaer) to be the solution to the log spam, which I found there to be almost 3 gigabytes of. In the end, the issue I didn’t even know I had been facing for months was fixed.

What I take away from this is that if a Windows or macOS system were to have such a flaw, it would be completely opaque and inevitable to the user because the system is intentionally concealed… Oh, right…