network manager talks too much

i recently outlined a solution gnome network manager’s broken wireless support.

as i was debugging this stuff, i noticed that network manager was creating a bunch of log entries in /var/log/messages. too much, it looked like. because it kept complaining about some rf killswitch that isn’t present on my hardware or something pedantic like that.

so, i parsed out /var/log/messages (get the parser, it’s tiny) to see how much it was really writing. how it works:

[huned@spork ~]$ sudo cat /var/log/messages | ./messages.rb
process,messages since 2007-07-01
system,15
gnome,4
gdm,3
dhcdbd,139
...

so, i uploaded the data to swivel and explored it a bit. i was somehow not surprised to find that network manager writes almost half the stuff in /var/log/messages. why do i get the same useless network manager info messages at what seems like greater than 1 Hz. seems kinda … excessive. this is what i’m talking about:

...
Jul  1 04:13:12 spork NetworkManager:   Error getting killswitch power: or
g.freedesktop.Hal.Device.KillSwitch.NotSupported - Access type not supported
Jul  1 04:13:48 spork last message repeated 6 times
Jul  1 04:14:49 spork last message repeated 10 times
Jul  1 04:15:55 spork last message repeated 11 times
Jul  1 04:17:01 spork last message repeated 11 times
Jul  1 04:18:07 spork last message repeated 11 times
Jul  1 04:19:13 spork last message repeated 11 times
...

here’s a pie graph of the top offenders that write to my laptop’s /var/log/messages. network manager + the linux kernel are more than 75% of those 22,000+ lines in /var/log/messages. network manager itself accounts for nearly half the lines in /var/log/messages. also, it’s a long tail — the top three take up 91% of the log file.