[systemd-devel] systemd.journald.forward_to doesn't forward all journal messages

[Chris Murphy]

On Thu, Aug 1, 2019 at 12:43 AM Stefan Tatschner <stefan at rumpelsepp.org> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2019-07-31 at 16:27 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:
> > The Obi Wan quote seems to apply here. "Who's the more foolish, the
> > fool, or the fool who follows him?"
> >
> > You're invited to stop following me.
>
> Calm down folks. I am certain he wanted to be sure that's not an xy
> problem: http://xyproblem.info/
>
> Sometimes it makes sense to ask these questions in order to potentially
> save everyone's time. Maybe without the “ass” word, but anyway…

Could be.

X = systemd-journald captured and recorded messages in system.journal;
for any number of reasons this might not be available if early
boot/startup crashes.
Y = what I'd accept as a fallback to 'journalctl' is the complete
"pretty" version of what systemd records by either forwarding the
journal to kmsg or to console

The problem I describe is, the contents of forwarding don't match up
with what's in the journal, and it seems like a bug or missing
functionality that so much (roughly 1/3 of messages) just don't get
forwarded. For example, set rd.debug, and then boot. Only a few early
dracut debug messages are forwarded to console or kmsg, the
overwhelming bulk of rd.debug messages are simply dropped. But they're
in the journal. So if I don't have the journal, and they're not
forwarded, it's a problem to debug an early startup failure.

And I freely admit that it's rare indeed that both the journal is
unavailable, and there are no useful hints at all forwarded to console
or kmsg. But I'm not even sure it's expected most all of the journal
messages should be forwarded with the forward parameter.


-- 
Chris Murphy