Bug#771707: Unbounded journal~ file accumulation

[Moyer, Keith]

Package: systemd
Version: 215-6
Severity: important
Tags: upstream patch

When an unclean shutdown/reboot occurs, systemd-journald creates a ...journal~ file in /var/log/journal/.../ on the next bootup.  This is expected and desirable.  Unlike a regular journal rotation, however, the creation of this journal~ file does not trigger a "vacuum" (cleanup of old log files based on things like SystemMaxUse) - which allows SystemMaxUse to be violated.

This becomes problematic if it occurs multiple times.  I've had the disk usage of /var/log/journal become 10x that which is specified in SystemMaxUse, to the point of filling the backing file system.  This caused other critical services that need to create files on this file system to fail to start.

This has been addressed upstream in the below one-line patch. I have applied this on top of 215-6 and confirmed that the issue goes away (unclean reboot removes oldest journal file when creating the new journal~ file).

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/systemd/systemd/commit/?id=3bfd4e0c6341b0ef946d2198f089743fa99e0a97

Please consider pulling in this trivial patch.