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6 June 2020

Random "xprop input/output error" on Pop!_OS

About a month ago I installed Pop!_OS as the only OS on my T480. I’m still very satisfied in general, although once in a while a “xprop input/output error” message pops up.

Shortly after that, Gnome icons would start to disappear, followed by xorg crashing completely. After that the system prints a bunch of errors:

EXT4-fs error (device nvme0n1p2): __ext4_find_entry:1531: inode #7352672 comm gmain: reading directory lblock 0

systemd-journald[442]: Failed to write entry (9 items, 325 bytes), ignoring: Input/output error

systemd-journald[442]: Failed to rotate /var/log/journal/90d5346a9517fb47bbd7bf195eadf0b7/system.journal: Read-only file system
systemd-journald[442]: Failed to rotate /var/log/journal/90d5346a9517fb47bbd7bf195eadf0b7/user-1000.journal: Read-only file system

EXT4-fs error (device nvme0n1p2): __ext4_find_entry:1531: inode #7352681 comm systemd: reading directory lblock 0
EXT4-fs error (device nvme0n1p2): __ext4_find_entry:1531: inode #7346652 comm systemd-logind: reading directory lblock 0

Note: nvme0n1p2 is my root fs

Since all of these are related to the filesystem, I ran a check on my root parition, but didn’t find any problems there.

dmesg contained two errors that might be related:

[    3.674746] systemd-journald[440]: File /var/log/journal/90d5346a9517fb47bbd7bf195eadf0b7/system.journal corrupted or uncleanly shut down, renaming and replacing.
[    3.716248] FAT-fs (nvme0n1p1): Volume was not properly unmounted. Some data may be corrupt. Please run fsck.

nvme0n1p1 is the UEFI partition on my device.

~A filesystem check revealed the UEFI partition to be corrupt - repairing it (sudo fsck /boot/efi) seems to have fixed the problem.~

~During the installation of Pop!_OS, I wiped the old UEFI partition, as the previous one did not suffice Pop!_OS’ size-requirements, and then overwrote it with a new, bigger partition. Most likely I messed up some settings at that time. Perhaps not wiping the old partition?~

Update: That didn’t quite solve it. The repair only cleaned up a dirty flag on the EFI parition. The actual problem is an incompatibility / bug with NVMe drives & powersaving.

What ultimately solved the issues, was adding a kernel parameter in the bootloader. Pop!_OS >= 18.04 uses systemd-boot (compared to Ubuntu’s GRUB), thus the changes necessary differ slightly.

In my case, I had to alter /boot/efi/loader/entries/Pop_OS-current.conf by appending nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=500 to the options section (description in the links below). After the changes the file looks like this:

title Pop!_OS
linux /EFI/Pop_OS-c2b02df2-66ab-4791-9763-5432d88e2526/vmlinuz.efi
initrd /EFI/Pop_OS-c2b02df2-66ab-4791-9763-5432d88e2526/initrd.img
options root=UUID=c2b02df2-66ab-4791-9763-5432d88e2526 ro quiet loglevel=0 systemd.show_status=false splash nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=500

Refs:

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