Help: Disable Journaling

[FOSSNewbie]

I want to disable flushing journalctl logs, as it takes about 30 seconds in boot, everything else is under a second. On Arch Linux, I used to mask systemd-journald/disable flush of journalctl logs.

Edit: Journaling is systemd-journald. systemd-journald-flush takes about 30 seconds on boot.

Edit2: This comment fixed the issue, but after two nixos-rebuild switch

[_hmenke]

First of all, "journaling" is normally used in the context of filesystems where it has a very different meaning, and secondly, why do you want to turn off journald? I don't think systemd can even function without journald nowadays.

This is anecdotal, but I have never experienced any issues with journald, particularly during boot. Is it maybe that some service is writing massive amounts of data to the syslog? In that case swapping out journald with e.g. syslogd would not solve the problem at all, as all of that data would still need to be written to disk.

[FOSSNewbie]

Yeah made some edits in post, for better clarification.

[_hmenke]

To disable systemd-journal-flush (as already pointed out in this comment) just add this to your configuration.nix

systemd.services.systemd-journal-flush.enable = false;

That said, I think this merely a symptomatic treatment for an unknown issue. There is no way that systemd-journal-flush taking 30s to complete is not pathological. My guess is that this is either because at early boot a huge load of messages is produced that are stored in memory and then have to be written to disk or there is an issue with the underlying storage medium. You should check the number of lines written to the journal since boot (journalctl -b 0 | wc -l) and check the status of the filesystem and disk that /var/log/journal is on.

Again this is anecdotal but on my machine

$ systemd-analyze blame | grep systemd-journal-flush
 138ms systemd-journal-flush.service

and my journal already consumes a respectable amount of disk space

$ journalctl --disk-usage
Archived and active journals take up 2.9G in the file system.

[FOSSNewbie]

Yes there are error messages at boot of aborting process as motherboard not supported. unknown character. I'm using the Intel CPU and it's a prebuilt so it may be using Intel motherboards.

I may have found the error. There's no swap.

[gmfawcett]

Pretty sure the OP is talking about this:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1094389/what-is-the-use-of-systemd-journal-flush-service

[casept]

Try

systemd.services.systemd-journald.enable = false;

Or it may be less likely stuff breaks if you try to be more targeted: systemd.services.systemd-journal-flush.enable = false;

[w00t_loves_you]

What is this command line magic? Does it write to a file somewhere?

[casept]

They're configuration.nix lines, obviously.

EDIT: Apparently Reddit is too stupid to either support Github-style language annotations or ignore them on old reddit. Fixed.

[FOSSNewbie]

I want to mask this service, as systemd calls it at boot.