Howdy folks, new customer here.

I set up an Ubuntu 8.04 Linode earlier tonight (ahem...yesterday evening now, I guess). Around 1 AM I got an email from the friendly monitoring program telling me something was horribly wrong and my server was performing an average of 422 disk IO operations a second.

I poked around trying to figure out what could be doing that and I noticed /var/log/syslog and /var/log/messages were getting spammed up with this:



I wasn't sure if that was causing my disk IO woes, but that sure as hell looks like it merited fixing. I kept an eye on ps aux and the log to figure out what process was dying, and it turned out to be processes like this:



My friend and I did some googling, and we turned up with this forum post.

Ubuntu handles starting the ttys slightly differently than described in that post: there's a file in /etc/event.d that tells it to respawn /sbin/getty for tty0 if it dies. I commented the respawn lines out and rebooted.



Lassie was kind enough to turn my VM back on for me. It booted up without a problem, and the out-of-band console looked happy enough. It's using tty1 now, but I didn't check to see if its using tty0 before or not. I'd wager it wasn't.

I ssh'd in and found that my logs were no longer being spammed with messages about init dying. Yay!

Can anyone confirm whether or not this is a problem caused by Xen trying to kill tty0? Is this a bug? Is there a better solution to the problem...?

tty0 doesn't exist on xen (only tty1 does), so that's why getty on tty0 was dying.

I had a similiar problem - some package I installed added a file to /etc/event.d called hvc0, and I had a bunch of similiar but with hvc0.

Thanks to duplicity backups I was able to tell the file hadn't been there that morning...