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This is a two part question. First is there any harm in deleting the syslog or syslog.x files where x is an integer >= 1 in a chain of syslog files. These files are taking up 90% of my disk space.

Details: I'm getting this error in the log file.

tail -f /var/log/syslog.1:

May  5 00:06:22 Skynet org.gnome.Nautilus[2942]: [00007f92580911b0] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer attributes failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
May  5 00:06:22 Skynet org.gnome.Nautilus[2942]: [00007f92580911b0] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer attributes failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
May  5 00:06:22 Skynet org.gnome.Nautilus[2942]: [00007f92580911b0] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer rendering failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
May  5 00:06:22 Skynet org.gnome.Nautilus[2942]: [00007f92580911b0] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer features failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
May  5 00:06:22 Skynet org.gnome.Nautilus[2942]: [00007f92580911b0] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer attributes failure: An invalid handle value was provided.
May  5 00:06:22 Skynet org.gnome.Nautilus[2942]: [00007f92580911b0] vdpau_chroma filter error: video mixer rendering failure: An invalid handle value was provided.

I found a similar post, I don't know what is producing the gigabytes of error in syslog, and they suggest that VLC is causing this error. I am also using VLC and suspect it's the cause of the problem. How can I free up my disk space?

I was thinking to do something like

cat /dev/null > /var/log/syslog.1

and hope that it will fix it for the time being. Anyone have any other ideas?

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  • Do you have Nvidia? If so, what model, and what version Nvidia driver?
    – heynnema
    May 5, 2020 at 18:16

2 Answers 2

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I recommend freeing space by deleting the syslog.x and syslog.x.gz files first while you work on solving the issue of the logs filling up quickly with these error messages.

My research indicates the issue is likely related to a bug in the package nvidia-driver-435 or VLC or a combination of the two. See the Bug Report here.

You can determine your graphics hardware and driver information by running:

sudo lshw -c display

Further details and possible root causes can be found Here.

As a start, I recommend using a media player other than VLC to see if the log entries cease.

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stop the syslog daemon, just delete the file and restart the daemon. This will re-create the file. Command line depends on which syslog daemon you use, in my case i would run: systemctl stop rsyslogd; rm /var/log/syslog; systemctl start rsyslog

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  • I ended up doing that for the syslog.1 file since it was consuming about 80% of the disk space. I don't want to do it on the syslog file as it's currently in use still by other applications so I'm avoiding it for now. It's still taking up about 10% of my disk space, but I can live with that for now. Thanks for your suggestion.
    – Pachuca
    May 5, 2020 at 23:45

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