[systemd-devel] Antw: [EXT] Re: Journald retaining logs for only 10 days

[Vito Caputo]

On Mon, Nov 16, 2020 at 07:43:27AM +0000, Mikko.Rapeli at bmw.de wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Interesting dicussion, here is one more view point. Few months back we tried to
> limit systemd journald output to retain a few MB of logs on embedded,
> headless boxes on a tiny read-write partition in case something goes horribly wrong
> on them, but failed to get an accurate calculation of upper limit for journald log
> output. The settings in journald size limits did not seem to be connected to the actual
> log file sizes on disk which were always quite a bit larger than limits we set.
> 
> We could not spare a dedicated partition and I did not see the point of setting
> file system quota limits as journald runs as root.
> 
> So it would really be nice to have some option to set a hard limit for the
> on-disk journald output files. A limit on some intermediate log output format is nice
> and works on server and desktop systems where plenty of read-write storage is available,
> but for more embedded boxes it wasn't useful.
> 

If you're attempting to confine journals to under 8MiB, it's just not
going to happen as-is.

You might want to open an RFE issue requesting that the
FILE_SIZE_INCREASE define in journal-file be runtime configurable,
and/or clamped by the existing size limits.

Regards,
Vito Caputo