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This is disingenuous, systemd-journald is the default in every systemd-using distribution I am aware of. The philosophy of systemd is all about tight coupling and forcing its singular vision on end users. When that vision falls apart you can not claim it is not really a systemd problem because in theory you could have gone out of your way and done something that is not encouraged.

No, you cannot run systemd without journald. Journald can forward messages to another syslog implementation. Its launch is even hardcoded into systemd very early in the boot process IIRC. The intent is to capture early log messages in memory inside journald before a writable /var is available.

But you know that my post is a criticism of the systemd ecosystem, or, more specifically, its status as the de facto. All my systems that run systemd run journald; all of my systems that run journald run systemd. Because those are the choices the distro devs made. My systems which don't run systemd are immune to these vulnerabilities.