NAME

       systemd-pstore.service, systemd-pstore - A service to archive contents of pstore

SYNOPSIS

       /lib/systemd/systemd-pstore

       systemd-pstore.service

DESCRIPTION

       systemd-pstore.service is a system service that archives the contents of the Linux
       persistent storage filesystem, pstore, to other storage, thus preserving the existing
       information contained in the pstore, and clearing pstore storage for future error events.

       Linux provides a persistent storage file system, pstore, that can store error records when
       the kernel dies (or reboots or powers-off). These records in turn can be referenced to
       debug kernel problems (currently the kernel stores the tail of the kernel log, which also
       contains a stack backtrace, into pstore).

       The pstore file system supports a variety of backends that map onto persistent storage,
       such as the ACPI ERST and UEFI variables. The pstore backends typically offer a relatively
       small amount of persistent storage, e.g. 64KiB, which can quickly fill up and thus prevent
       subsequent kernel crashes from recording errors. Thus there is a need to monitor and
       extract the pstore contents so that future kernel problems can also record information in
       the pstore.

       The pstore service is independent of the kdump service. In cloud environments
       specifically, host and guest filesystems are on remote filesystems (e.g. iSCSI or NFS),
       thus kdump relies (implicitly and/or explicitly) upon proper operation of networking
       software *and* hardware *and* infrastructure. Thus it may not be possible to capture a
       kernel coredump to a file since writes over the network may not be possible.

       The pstore backend, on the other hand, is completely local and provides a path to store
       error records which will survive a reboot and aid in post-mortem debugging.

       The systemd-pstore executable does the actual work. Upon starting, the pstore.conf file is
       read and the /sys/fs/pstore/ directory contents are processed according to the options.
       Pstore files are written to the journal, and optionally saved into
       /var/lib/systemd/pstore/.

CONFIGURATION

       The behavior of systemd-pstore is configured through the configuration file
       /etc/systemd/pstore.conf and corresponding snippets /etc/systemd/pstore.conf.d/*.conf, see
       pstore.conf(5).

   Disabling pstore processing
       To disable pstore processing by systemd-pstore, set

           Storage=none

       in pstore.conf(5).

   Kernel parameters
       The kernel has two parameters, /sys/module/kernel/parameters/crash_kexec_post_notifiers
       and /sys/module/printk/parameters/always_kmsg_dump, that control writes into pstore. The
       first enables storing of the kernel log (including stack trace) into pstore upon a panic
       or crash, and the second enables storing of the kernel log upon a normal shutdown
       (shutdown, reboot, halt). These parameters can be managed via the tmpfiles.d(5) mechanism,
       specifically the file /usr/lib/tmpfiles/systemd-pstore.conf.

USAGE

       Data stored in the journal can be viewed with journalctl(1) as usual.

SEE ALSO

       pstore.conf(5)