Comment # 7 on bug 1156421 from Thorsten Kukuk

(In reply to Fabian Vogt from comment #6)
> (In reply to Franck Bui from comment #3)

> > Hmm... the only reason I can see is that /var is still a RO partition at the
> > time the journal is flushed and therefore the system journal couldn't be
> > created in /var.
> 
> /var is mounted read-write in the initrd already. So unless something
> re-mounts it multiple times during boot, I don't think that's the case.

systemd remounts that at first after leaving the initrd, at least it did so
when we debugged similar problems with apparmor.
There we had the same problems, even if the filesystem was mounted read-write
in the initrd, systemd remounted it to read-only and later to read-write, and
loading the apparmor profiles failed due to read-only /var.