Hi Lennart,

I suppose someone should mention small flash-disk-only computers.

There traditionally we fling syslog messages to the serial console or a LRU 
buffer in RAM (often the dmesg buffer). The point is to avoid I/O on the flash 
memory. Syslog daemons tend to do a lot of fsync-ed I/O, which just chews up 
flash write cycles. With some configuration the syslog daemons can be made to 
not to fsync, and with additional configuration to write to the serial port or 
to the dmesg ring buffer.

These small computers aren't specialised embedded systems anymore -- if you buy 
a cheap ARM-based laptop then you are buying a such a system. Their increasing 
popularity is very much the reason ARM is becoming a top-teir architecture in 
Fedora. These systems are *cheap*, so they don't have the write cycles of an 
expensive SSD.

I'm not across journald at all. But the questions in my mind are:

- Is is possible to run journald without writing to disk; that is: to serial as 
text, or as binary to a ring buffer which can then by used by journalctl?

- When writing to disk does journald fsync, and if so can that be disabled by a 
non-guru laptop user?

- Is journalctl available from the dracut shell, so that we can get bug reports 
for early system failures? There is a lot more variation in small computers, 
and thus more early system failures.

Thank you for making the binary format portable between computers. Allowing a 
32b ARM journal file to be displayed on a x86_64 desktop is very useful.

Thank you for your time, glen
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