Irqbalance.service fails on boot

[techietubby]

The service fails to start and provides the following errors:

systemctl status irqbalance.service -l

× irqbalance.service - irqbalance daemon
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/irqbalance.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Wed 2025-03-12 11:07:04 CET; 50min ago
Duration: 54ms
Docs: man:irqbalance(1)
GitHub - Irqbalance/irqbalance: The irqbalance source tree - The new official site for irqbalance
Process: 4264 ExecStart=/usr/sbin/irqbalance $IRQBALANCE_ARGS (code=exited, status=217/USER)
Main PID: 4264 (code=exited, status=217/USER)
CPU: 52ms

systemd[1]: Started irqbalance daemon.
systemd[4264]: irqbalance.service: Failed to set up user namespacing: No space left on device
systemd[4264]: irqbalance.service: Failed at step USER spawning /usr/sbin/irqbalance: No space left on device
systemd[1]: irqbalance.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=217/USER
systemd[1]: irqbalance.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.

I found some articles on the net that mentioned tuning in /etc/sysctl.conf but they were for other distros.

[iwalker]

The error “No space left on device” should be a hint that somewhere you are out of disk space.

[techietubby]

There is plenty of disk space. If you do some searches you will see it is happening in /proc. The machine also has plenty of free RAM.

I have no active RedHat subscription but they seem to know all about this problem and there are a lot of articles on their site.
Getting Error: No space left on device when attempting to start services - Red Hat Customer Portal
The closest I can get is:
# bwrap: Creating new namespace failed: No space left on device · Issue #371 · containers/bubblewrap

[iwalker]

That suggests doing the following:

# vim /etc/sysctl.conf
  fs.inotify.max_user_watches = 524288
# sysctl -p
# service rsyslog restart
  Redirecting to /bin/systemctl restart  rsyslog.service

of course in your instance it’s not rsyslog but irqbalance to restart. BTW you can register for Red Hat Developer subscription for free and gain access to those articles.

That said on my Rocky 9 server I have irqbalance running and never had to do any of this. So seems something unique to certain situations/configurations. Perhaps ensure you have all updates applied to your system as well just in case.

[techietubby]

I ended-up adding user.max_user_namespaces = 10000 to /etc/sysctl.conf.

Thanks for the suggestions.

[techietubby]

I have a Dev subscription but some answers are now paid-only.