If you perform a standard installation of Ubuntu Server (especially utilizing the LVM storage layout), the operating system frequently installs and activates the multipathd daemon by default. Multipath I/O is a storage routing technology designed for enterprise SAN (Storage Area Network) environments. If your server is connected to a massive external storage array via multiple physical Fibre Channel or iSCSI cables, multipathd monitors all the redundant paths and aggregates them into a single logical block device, ensuring that if one cable is severed, data continues flowing over the backup cable.
While this is critical for high-availability enterprise servers, it is utterly useless bloatware on 99% of cloud instances, virtual machines, and bare-metal servers equipped with standard local NVMe or SATA drives. Because your local SSD only has a single connection to the motherboard, multipathing is impossible. Leaving the daemon running forces the server to needlessly scan the PCI bus for redundant paths that do not exist, frequently spamming your syslog and journalctl logs with annoying “failed to initialize multipath” or “add path” errors. To stop the kernel from hunting for ghost cables and to silence your system logs, you must completely disable the multipath daemon.
Stopping and Disabling Multipathd via Systemctl
Because the device mapper is managed by systemd, you can instantly terminate the daemon and permanently prevent it from launching at boot time.
- Open a Terminal session (or connect to your server via SSH).
- First, stop the daemon and its associated socket if they are currently running:
sudo systemctl stop multipathd.servicesudo systemctl stop multipathd.socket - Next, permanently disable the services so that they do not automatically launch the next time you reboot the server:
sudo systemctl disable multipathd.servicesudo systemctl disable multipathd.socket
Uninstalling the Multipath Tools Entirely (Recommended)
To guarantee that no future kernel update or LVM dependency attempts to resurrect the daemon, you should purge the software from your hard drive.
- In the terminal, run the following command to completely uninstall the package and delete its configuration files:
sudo apt-get purge multipath-tools - Press Y when prompted to confirm the removal.
- Clean up any orphaned dependencies left behind:
sudo apt-get autoremove
With the multipath daemon completely eradicated from the system, your Ubuntu server will boot slightly faster. More importantly, your system logs will immediately become significantly cleaner, completely devoid of the redundant path-scanning errors that typically plague single-drive deployments.