The chart shows how the Ubuntu boot process is going on my 5 years old Thinkpad T60. Bootchart utility does such charts automatically. If you are interesting in how easy it is to enable such bootcharting read below.
Installing bootchart
You need bootchart and pybootchartgui
apt-get install bootchart
apt-get install pybootchartgui
That will automatically add bootchart logger to your grub configuration. Restart your machine and look for an image file in /var/log/bootchart directory.
Disabling bootchart
Someday you maybe want to disable bootchart again.
To disable it just throw it out of your GRUB configuration. On GRUB 2 (which is the default on ubuntu since v. 9.10) you have to change file /etc/default/grub.
Change line
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"
to
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash bootchart=disable"
and then run:
sudo update-grub
You are done.
P.S. On GRUB 1 you have to edit /boot/grub/menu.lst.