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Alexander Holbreich
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Bootcharting

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.


Archived comments (4)

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  • Anon

    What about the more interesting bootchart programs like http://people.gnome.org/~mi... / http://github.com/mmeeks/bo... that overcome some of the deficiencies in the original?

  • AlexH

    Thank you Anon for nice presentation and for pointing me to Bootcharting2.
    I tried bootcharting just for fun and because i'm interested on what hapens on linux startup. But i'm not a hard core native linux optimisator so far ;)
    Do you use bootcharting2 and such tools for boot time optimisation?

  • Anon

    Hi shuron,

    I wish I had the time. I've poked at various bits and pieces in my own boot to speed things up and do things like compile a kernel without modules that speeds things up a bit but really there isn't much left to win short of starting less and careful preloading on my particular system...

  • AlexH

    Hi Anon, nice hobby. ;) Of course time is allways a problem;)
    Maybe i will find some time to dive into linux start-up functionality and post here some results or questions. ;)