journald - ability to prefix events with timestamps in system time when forwarded to console

Submission type

• Bug report
• Request for enhancement (RFE)

NOTE: Do not submit anything other than bug reports or RFEs via the issue tracker!

systemd version the issue has been seen with

v299+

Used distribution

N/A

In case of bug report: Expected behaviour you didn't see

Timestamped events emitted to console using local system time

In case of bug report: Unexpected behaviour you saw

Events spooled to console use seconds since boot. e.g:

[  880.140763] CRON[3279]: pam_unix(cron:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)

Steps to reproduce the problem

By enabling ForwardToConsole and setting an appropriate TTYPath journald can spool events to console:

ForwardToConsole=yes
TTYPath=/dev/console

While I wasn't able to find documentation on getting journald to emit a timestamp to the console, I stumbled upon "/sys/module/printk/parameters/time" [0]. By setting this parameter you can get journald to prefix events with the time since boot, but there is no support for utilizing the current system time [1].

[0] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/master/src/journal/journald-console.c#L36-49
[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/master/src/journal/journald-console.c#L72-79

Start with src/journal/journald-console.c, especially the linked sections handling /sys/module/printk/parameters/time and console output. Trace how ForwardToConsole and TTYPath reach this code, then determine how a system-time prefix should be represented. Done means forwarded console events can use the current system time rather than only seconds since boot.