This is controlled by the common option log_to_syslog, which is enabled by
default on Android.
There is a side effect to this as syslog can use malloc or the like. This
is not ideal as this could be called in a failure path while the heap is
corrupted, but it's pretty much compulsory to have that for Android.
The plan is to change WriteOneLineToSyslog to use async_safe_write_log if
available, which doesn't do dynamic memory allocation (added to the Bionic libc
somewhat recently).
I forgot to say that this was removed because the background thread will be coming back, but in another form.