trouble understanding journalctl boot selection

[mahesh]

I'm trying to grasp the basics of journalctl...

I have SystemMaxUse=200M in /etc/systemd/journald.conf and it seems to be working fine.

If I do:

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# journalctl --list-bootsI see:

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# journalctl --list-boots
IDX BOOT ID                          FIRST ENTRY                 LAST ENTRY
 -4 1d9c21ed87a54cec81116a3b4c91d72c Wed 2023-08-23 11:42:35 PDT Wed 2023-08-23 12:10:30 PDT
 -3 35dc89cc179f425289dccb2049668fe3 Wed 2023-08-23 13:15:02 PDT Wed 2023-08-23 16:53:28 PDT
 -2 811261b05fc54099847fcc35378eda89 Thu 2023-08-24 00:23:39 PDT Wed 2023-08-23 17:33:38 PDT
 -1 446b22a0dc9a456aa4ddbaf1f4ef03c3 Wed 2023-08-23 17:34:38 PDT Wed 2023-08-23 19:52:24 PDT
  0 820d582bec84443f9b7f0fa7993ff571 Wed 2023-08-23 20:07:30 PDT Wed 2023-08-23 21:52:14 PDT...these are all like a week old, despite me having used the computer every day. Where are the more recent boots?

Also, boot index -2 starts at Aug 24 12:23 AM and ends on Aug 23rd at 5:33 pm, the day before? Can that happen if the system clock is getting yanked around while logging? (I dual boot and sometimes Windows messes things up...)

Furthermore:

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# cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/boot_id
1be56922-cd0b-45ea-b9bc-ed1790eb712d...the current boot ID is not shown in the list at --list-boots, which confuses me.

Futhermore:

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# journalctl -xb 0 | head -n 1...shows Sep 01 16:34:34 as the first line timestamp (which seems accurate if interpreted as UTC; maybe the system doesn't adjust for local time until later).

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# journalctl -xb -1 | head -n 1...shows Sep 01 16:00:52, which might be accurate (I might have booted and then rebooted for some reason, don't recall.)

However:

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# journalctl -xb -2 | head -n 1...again shows Sep 01 16:34:34. "-xb -3" again shows Sep 01 16:00:52, and on and on. It's as if it is doing a modulo N where N is the # of boots, which seems bizarre. E.g. "-xb -7000" shows Sep 01 16:34:34.

And again, none of these Sep 01 boots, or any of the boots since the 23rd, show up in --list-boots.

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# journalctl --verify
...shows everything passing. What am I missing?

(Note: I recently moved my / and /home to new partitions, which involved cloning them and so forth, but everything went fine, and at any rate I've been running normally for 5 or 6 days at this point.)

Thanks for any insight!