Bug 679410 – sys-apps/systemd-{239-r{3,4},240-r{3,4}} - systemd-journald[]: Failed to write entry (xx items, yyy bytes), ignoring: Cannot allocate memory

• Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Alexander Tsoy 2019-03-04 16:23:12 UTC]

journald started to leak virtual memory after recent CVE fixes. In upstream bug report [1] it was bisected down to the following commit:
[2d5d2e0cc5171c6795d2a485841474345d9e30ab] basic/process-util: limit command line lengths to _SC_ARG_MAX

This could be a real problem, especially on 32bit arches with 3Gb limit of per-process virtual memory. An example from my armv7 board:

$ sudo dmesg | tail -n10
[2628500.175655] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to write entry (20 items, 670 bytes), ignoring: Cannot allocate memory
[2628500.189167] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to write entry (20 items, 684 bytes), ignoring: Cannot allocate memory
[2628549.396897] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to write entry (20 items, 503 bytes), ignoring: Cannot allocate memory
[2628549.462885] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to write entry (20 items, 499 bytes), ignoring: Cannot allocate memory
[2628549.486545] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to write entry (20 items, 494 bytes), ignoring: Cannot allocate memory
[2629089.528791] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to write entry (20 items, 496 bytes), ignoring: Cannot allocate memory
[2629689.644943] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to write entry (20 items, 496 bytes), ignoring: Cannot allocate memory
[2630289.851904] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to create new system journal: Cannot allocate memory
[2630289.929109] systemd-journald[220]: Failed to create new user journal: Cannot allocate memory
[2630289.948503] systemd-journald[220]: File /var/log/journal/eed2edca90707d8527f02e315b930758/system.journal corrupted or uncleanly shut down, renaming and replacing.

$ ps auxwww | grep journal
root       220  0.0  3.1 3122936 15764 ?       Ss   Jan27   2:29 /lib/systemd/systemd-journald



There are several patches mentioned in upstream issue that should address this bug: [2], [3]. But I haven't tried them yet.


[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/11502
[2] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/11527
[3] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/11530

[Comment 1 Mike Gilbert 2019-03-04 17:16:31 UTC]

Is this fixed in 241?

[Comment 2 Alexander Tsoy 2019-03-04 17:23:26 UTC]

Yes, this should be fixed in 241

[Comment 3 Alexander Tsoy 2019-03-04 17:38:28 UTC]

This was also fixed in stable 239 and 240 branches

[Comment 4 Mike Gilbert 2019-04-05 21:01:46 UTC]

241 is being stabilized, so closing this.