Blacklist module: mei_me, spams until unloaded
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#202 Blacklist module: mei_me, spams until unloaded
Dear Clonezilla developers
I wanted to ask if you could blacklist the mei_me kernel module in the clonezilla images.
On machines where this module loads, it spams to the screen every couple of seconds with:
[<timestamp>]</timestamp> mei_mei 0000:00:03.0: timer: connect/disconnect timeout
It makes use of Clonezilla quite difficult since it spills all over the Clonezilla screen until you unload it ('sudo rmmod mei_me').
The machines I've seen this were Lenovo M55p (Intel Q965) and M57p (Intel Q35) systems but the Intel Management Engine (sometimes marketed as vPro) is also built into recent Intel-based business desktops for remote management capabilities. The issue is not unknown (i.e. at Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1196155) but but for a live system the blacklisting has to be made at the build stage.
Personally I don't see much use of Intel ME support within Clonezilla so it wouldn't be much of a functional loss, but the current behaviour makes things quite unpleasant on such machines when you don't know the workaround. Would you consider such a change?
-- Mathieu
Beyond much gratitude for creating and maintaining this piece of software, really!)
Maybe you can try to add the following one in your boot parameters:
mei-me.blacklist=yes
I'd like to honor what the Linux kernel does, and actually I never use it. However, someone might do use mei to manage the machine remotely, e.g. shutdown or reboot.
Steven.