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tumbler journal spam while downloading videos
Status:
RESOLVED: MOVED
Product:
Tumbler
Component:
General

Comments

Description Ralf Teres 2014-08-25 09:19:09 CEST
Hi!

I've been getting awful systemd journal spam from what I believe to be ffmpegthumbnailer through tumbler while thunar is open in a folder where videos are being downloaded. ~10 messages like this per second with only 2 running downloads:

org.freedesktop.thumbnails.Thumbnailer1[3558]: [h264 @ 0x7f360d0b3300] AVC: nal size 0

The amount of journal spam this generates on my machine dominates my logs and renders having a system journal open in the first place totally useless. It can accumulate millions of unnecessary lines in the logs over the course of a month with normal usage. 

Tumbler should probably not relay all of the output generated by the programs it calls to the systemd journal.
Also Tumbler / Thunar should probably not try to generate / request thumbnails for the same file over and over again with such a high frequency while it is still being downloaded.

Using tumbler 0.1.30
Comment 1 Nils Steinger 2020-02-11 17:18:33 CET
This bug is actually more severe than it might seem at first: The journal daemon usually runs with elevated privileges, so it can fill the harddisk to the very last byte, rendering the system unusable.

That's already very inconvenient on a single-user system, but combined with a bug in a thumbnailer [1], it can become an attack vector for unprivileged local users on a shared system [2].

It's suboptimal that journald allows this to happen, but perhaps it can also be prevented in tumbler?
I don't have a ready solution unfortunately, but perhaps a cut-off after a certain amount of output would help, and/or a timeout for any thumbnailers invoked by tumbler?

[1]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/dia/issues/428
[2]: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2019-19451
Comment 2 tweb 2020-05-09 08:40:38 CEST
Just experienced this problem while/after downloading videos to a folder that was open in Thunar.  `rsyslogd` used 100% of one CPU core.  After a `killall tumblerd` and re-opening the folder in Thunar, the thumbnails were then generated correctly.

/var/log/syslog has the following lines:

May  9 07:56:18 XXX tumblerd[27936]: gst_poll_read_control: assertion 'set != NULL' failed
May  9 07:56:51 XXX tumblerd[27936]: message repeated 909205 times: [ gst_poll_read_control: assertion 'set != NULL' failed]
May  9 07:56:51 XXX tumblerd[27936]: gst_poll_read_control: assertion 'set != NULL' failed

(Does that mean 909205 messages were logged between 07:56:18 and 07:56:51?)
Comment 3 Git Bot editbugs 2020-05-25 23:18:23 CEST
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message --

This bug has been migrated to xfce.org's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity.

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Bug #11106

Reported by:
Ralf Teres
Reported on: 2014-08-25
Last modified on: 2020-05-25

People

Assignee:
Jannis Pohlmann
CC List:
3 users

Version

Version:
unspecified

Attachments

Additional information