Systemd Introduces A New & Practical Service For Dealing With PStore

Adding to the list of new features for systemd 243 is another last-minute addition to this growing init system... Systemd picked up a new service and while some may view it as bloat, should be quite practical at least for those encountering kernel crashes from time to time.

Linux for several years now has offered a Pstore file-system that maps to persistent storage for recording kernel panics/errors and other debug logs that can be retained when a kernel crashes or system reboot happens and other behavior where normally all information is lost.

That persistent storage is on motherboards in the form of memory for UEFI variables or ACPI ERST and generally very small (circa 64K). So only the very latest debug information can be stored and if you don't archive it quickly can be wiped out. What systemd now has is a Pstore service to back-up this data from pstore to the disk.

Systemd's Pstore service will now archive the information from /sys/fs/pstore to /var/lib/systemd/pstore in order to preserve that information and allow the space for logging future errors. Of course, hopefully your system isn't hitting kernel panics so often, but if you habitually use Linux Git or are a kernel developer, often dealing with finicky hardware, etc, this Pstore back-up service may prove quite handy.

More details on the systemd Pstore service via this commit. This new service will be found in the upcoming systemd 243 release.