There is no auditd service that could be disabled while the system is running, but it turns out that adding the boot option audit=0 seems to disable all of these messages. The system is usable again, even on command line without X running.
This option can be set temporarily (the change will not survive a reboot):
- When the Grub boot menu appears (right after turning the power on), hit e to edit the boot parameters. This will show a huge text box.
- Scroll down to the line that starts with "linux". Hit the End key to move the cursor to the end of the line.
- Enter a whitespace character so that you don't break the last option, then append
audit=0. For example... LANG=en_US.UTF-8 audit=0(not...UTF-8audit=0, obviously). - Be careful not to change anything else. If you've accidentally modified some other option, fix it or reboot and start over.
- Hit F10 to boot the system.
Of course, this change will only be in effect while the system is running. The audit flood will come back after a reboot. To make this change permanent, the boot configuration has to be changed permanently. On Fedora, it should be enough to simply modify /boot/grub2/grub.cfg because when a new kernel is installed (system update), grubby should copy the options of the latest kernel to the newly installed kernel. This means, audit=0 has to be appended to the first linux line (first menuentry section) in this file. It shouldn't be necessary to change ./etc/default/grub
Correction: Actually, the correct and most reliable approach is to edit /etc/default/grub and regenerate the Grub config using grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, thanks KnightLordAndMaster for pointing this out.
Additional note on audit logs in log files:
As a side note, the following line should prevent audit logs from ending up in log files, but they would still clutter dmesg and the console, so this is not a solution in itself. This line would be put as first rule in /etc/rsyslog.conf:
...
#### RULES ####
# no audit
:programname, isequal, "audit" ~
...
Edit: thisThis now results in the following warning:
rsyslogd[xxxx]: warning: ~ action is deprecated, consider using the 'stop' statement instead [v8.35.0 try http://www.rsyslog.com/e/2307]