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MLEvD

Member

Registered: 2021-02-14

Posts: 141  

Kernel plod?

Caused an interesting situation, wondering if anyone can shed light on it? Forgot to resize /var after taking a disk image backup (it's good to loose /var/cache/apt /var/cache/apt-xapian-index and /var/lib/apt/lists to save space).
Rebooted fine but for some reason the system needed to create a new initramfs for new software, this filled /var and caused the system to complain. I could only get the keyboard to respond by typing hard and it was slow. Rebooted and the problem was the same. Eventually realised, used another live system to resize /var, updated, all fine again.

What was going on with the slow insensitive keyboard?

chris2be8

Member

Registered: 2018-08-11

Posts: 307  

Re: Kernel plod?

I doubt the keyboard really needed to be pressed harder than normal to get it to work. I've had it seem to need it, but eventually found it was an illusion caused by the system running slowly so it *seemed* to ignore keystrokes. Eventually I found pressing key normally always worked if the system was responding at all.

Why /var filling caused the system to respond slowly is more interesting. Do you have any swap files in /var? Were you logged on as root or as a user? If root where would it's home files be? I would expect anything writing to /var to be slow, eg logon writes to /var/log/wtmp. And anything writing to syslog would struggle.

Chris