Settings specific for MariaDB specific are defined in appropriate section in /etc/my.cnf.d/server.cnf (part of mariadb-server). It doesn't matter that we set these settings only for [mysqld] here, because they will be read and used in mysqld_safe as well. Settings in my.cnf are generic for all MySQL implementations because of conflict issues. RHBZ#1003115 diff -up mariadb-10.0.10/support-files/rpm/server.cnf.p13 mariadb-10.0.10/support-files/rpm/server.cnf --- mariadb-10.0.10/support-files/rpm/server.cnf.p13 2014-04-07 20:12:54.260193809 +0200 +++ mariadb-10.0.10/support-files/rpm/server.cnf 2014-04-07 20:12:24.758256491 +0200 @@ -18,6 +18,8 @@ # If you use the same .cnf file for MySQL and MariaDB, # you can put MariaDB-only options here [mariadb] +log-error=/var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log +pid-file=/var/run/mariadb/mariadb.pid # This group is only read by MariaDB-10.0 servers. # If you use the same .cnf file for MariaDB of different versions,