/var/log as persistent

Patrick Williams patrick at stwcx.xyz
Wed May 29 03:31:13 AEST 2024


Hello,

It was pointed out that I did not do a good job of broadcasting a change
I made back in March, so I am sending this out for awareness now.

https://gerrit.openbmc.org/c/openbmc/openbmc/+/69959

A default setting from bitbake (to VOLATILE_LOG_DIR) was causing some
platforms to not be able to persist `/var/log` and instead it was
mounted as a temporary directory.  This meant that even if you
explicitly configured journald to use `/var/log` (instead of the
`/run/log` it uses by default) you would not get persistent journalling.
It also meant that applications like `obmc-console` log files were not
persistent and would be lost in a BMC reboot.

I had asked a few machine owners and most of them either had it set to
explicitly unset `VOLATILE_LOG_DIR` in their meta-layer or through some
downstream changes had overwritten it.  So, I made this the default.

I thought this only affected:
   - machines that explicitly set `Storage=persistent` in the journald
     config.
   - everyone's obmc-console logs.

Based on the report from a downstream user, it seems like there might be
more effects?  I'm not sure at this point, but advertising it wider.

-- 
Patrick Williams
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