How to fix “Error of this Agent is reported first” on Lenovo ThinkStation with dual GPUs running Ubuntu Server

I recently set up an AI server in my home, based on a Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Tower Gen 2 (Intel). It worked fine with a single GPU, but upon adding the second GPU, I was getting a bunch of “Error of this Agent is reported first” errors spammed across the screen. They’d show up upon bootup, and then anytime I ran an AI workload that used the GPUs. Here’s how to easily resolve this issue by disabling ASPM.

My setup is a Lenovo ThinkStation P3 Tower Gen 2 (Intel), and two MSI NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB GPUs, with Ubuntu Server 25.04 as the OS, but based on some quick research online, this problem can occur across various hardware and software configurations.

There were two different variants of the same error showing up over and over:

pcieport 0000:80:1c.0: AER: Error of this Agent is reported first
nvidia 0000:81:00.0: AER: Error of this Agent is reported first

So, of course, I asked my AI what to do about it, and it suggested the issue might be related to ASPM, or “Active State Power Management,” a PCI-E enhancement that allows certain hardware devices to go into a very lower power state. Unfortunately, this causes issues with certain combinations of hardware and software.

Keeping in mind that while power consumption does matter to some extent, for an AI server with multiple GPUs, an extra watt here and there is not a concern. So, let’s disable ASPM to fix this error!

Open the Grub configuration in your favorite text editor. We’re going to use nano.

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

Now, find the “GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line and add “pcie_aspm=off” to it. It’s important you format it correctly. If you have any other contents in that line, you need to put a space between them, and they all need to be surrounded by quotes. Here are two examples.

With just pcie_aspm=off, it should look something like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="pcie_aspm=off"

With pcie_aspm=off and automatically turning off the connected screen, as per this article, it should look something like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="pcie_aspm=off consoleblank=60"

After you’re done, save and exit nano. If you’re new to nano, you’ll do Ctrl+O to save the file, Enter to confirm, and then Ctrl+X to quit nano.

Now, you need to update the grub bootloader with the changes you just made.

sudo update-grub

Finally, reboot your system.

sudo reboot

The changes should take affect, and if ASPM was the issue, you should no longer encounter those pesky “Error of this Agent is reported first” messages. In my case, this completely fixed the problem, and I have had no further issues running the two GPUs on the ThinkStation. If you still have the same errors after turning off ASPM, you may have something else going on – drivers, firmware, or hardware.