Journalctl says: "Failed to search journal ACL: Operation not supported"

When I run journalctl -xe as a non-root user, I get the following error:

bgeron@machine:~$ journalctl -xe
Failed to search journal ACL: Operation not supported
No journal files were opened due to insufficient permissions.

1 Answer

This can be caused by mounting ZFS with the wrong options. Journald requires access control lists, which are off by default in ZFS on Linux.

To enable access control lists, you must set the acltype=posixacl property on your filesystems. According to the zfs(8) man page, it is also recommended to set the xattr=sa property, which is more efficient, but only supported by "relatively new" ZFS implementations.

Set the properties as follows, for each filesystem:

zfs set acltype=posixacl poolname/path/to/fs && zfs set xattr=sa poolname/path/to/fs

After setting these properties, restart journald:

sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

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