I'm not the architect of journald and wasn't really around when these decisions were made, so I can't really speak authoritatively on that particular topic.

There was mailing list discussion at the time journald was conceived though, you can find it if you look.

https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-journal.html might be a good entry-point.

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otterley 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The mailing list archives are here: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/

It doesn't look like there was an open design review; Lennart Poettering just dropped it in in v38. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2012-Ja...

	▲	pengaru 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		FWIW the journal file signature is "LPKSHHRH" for Lennart, Kay Sievers, Harald Hoyer, Red Hat... I presumed it was at least Lennart, Kay, and Harald who collaborated on the design.

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marginalia_nu 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well there was an ambition, apparently.

> Performance: journal operations for appending and browsing should be fast in terms of complexity. O(log n) or better is highly advisable, in order to provide for organization-wide log monitoring with good performance

> Minimal Footprint: journal data files should be small in disk size, especially in the light that the amount of data generated might be substantially bigger than on classic syslog.