I was interested in speeding up the boot process on my older laptop, so in keeping with the basics, I sought to measure. After a little searching, I found a tool that looked interesting enough to take for a spin called bootchart that was, conveniently, in Portage:
After reboot, I selected the grub entry (bootchart) and let the bootchartd script do the rest. When the boot process was done, a collection of logs in a tgz archive and a visualization as a png was exported to /var/log as bootchart.tgz and bootchart.png, respectively.
The png produced is quite nice and indicates that the boot process took 20 seconds - not bad. At first glance, there appears to be room for improvement, but I'll leave that adventure for another day.
emerge -s bootchart
Searching... [ Results for search key : bootchart ] [ Applications found : 1 ] * app-benchmarks/bootchart Latest version available: 0.9-r2 Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ] Size of files: 217 kB Homepage: http://www.bootchart.org/ Description: Performance analysis and visualization of the system boot process License: GPL-2The application provides a script run by the kernel in the init phase that gathers system information in memory, exporting to various image formats on completion of the boot process. I switched to root and installed it.
sudo -s emerge -av app-benchmarks/bootchartI kept the default configuration in /etc/bootchartd.conf and added an entry to my grub.conf which included an additional kernel parameter:
mount /boot vi /boot/grub/grub.conf
... title Gentoo Linux 2.6.36-r5 (bootchart) root (hd0,0) kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.36-r5 root=/dev/sda3 init=/sbin/bootchartd processor.max_cstate=2 i915.modeset=1 ...The init kernel parameter allows for a different binary (such as /sbin/bootchartd) to be run instead of /sbin/init as the init process. I had some already-existing kernel parameters defined in my grub.conf to historically handle some Dell-specific noise and X issues; the init parameter was appended to the kernel line with the rest.
After reboot, I selected the grub entry (bootchart) and let the bootchartd script do the rest. When the boot process was done, a collection of logs in a tgz archive and a visualization as a png was exported to /var/log as bootchart.tgz and bootchart.png, respectively.
The png produced is quite nice and indicates that the boot process took 20 seconds - not bad. At first glance, there appears to be room for improvement, but I'll leave that adventure for another day.
Date: 2011-03-01 02:21:54 PST
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