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Enabling bootchart with Fedora 16

Sunday, January 8th, 2012

To install bootchart under fedora simply run

yum install bootchart

Once installed you simply need to enable a grub entry to call it.  You just need to add the init=/sbin/bootchartd string to the end of the kernel settings.

I actually copied the existing kernel entry and added it (incase I mistyped something)

title Fedora (3.1.6-1.fc16.i686.PAE) with bootchart
    root (hd2,0)
    kernel /vmlinuz-3.1.6-1.fc16.i686.PAE ro root=/dev/md126 rd_NO_LUKS rd_NO_LVM rd_NO_DM    LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SYSFONT=latarcyrheb-sun16 \
          KEYTABLE=de-latin1-nodeadkeys rhgb \
          quiet nouveau.modeset=0 rdblacklist=nouveau \
          init=/sbin/bootchartd
    initrd /initramfs-3.1.6-1.fc16.i686.PAE.img

Now when I reboot and select this grub entry a bootchart file is written to /var/log/bootchart.tgz

Then run the bootchart command to generate an image of the results.

Bootchart results from my fedora 16 installation

bootchart on gentoo

Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008

Well after reading an article on OpenRC at Roys webs, I decided to take a look at my current system. I started by emerging bootchart.

Firstly I needed to unmask bootchart

echo "app-benchmarks/bootchart" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords

I then enabled the java use flag so I get the java code to generate png files

echo "app-benchmarks/bootchart java" >> /etc/portage/package.use

then I emerged it

emerge -av bootchart

I had to add init=/sbin/bootchartd to the end of the /etc/grub/grub.conf kernel line like this

kernel /boot/kernel-2.6.23-tuxonice-r11 root=/dev/sda3 init=/sbin/bootchartd

Then I editted the /etc/conf.d/rc and changed

RC_USE_BOOTCHART="no"

to

RC_USE_BOOTCHART="yes"

I enabled the auto chart creation by editing /etc/bootchartd.conf and changing

AUTO_RENDER="no"

to

AUTO_RENDER="yes"

This is what I got the first time.

Virtually all of my boot time is spent checking the internal tree of the 2 300Gb disks. One disk took around 17 seconds to check and the second one too around 15 seconds (its slightly smaller). Both are reiserfs. Both disks were unmounted cleanly and the fsck knew they were clean file systems, but the tree check still takes some time.

Do I really want it to not check the file system when it boot? That is the question…..

Heres the bootchart with the check disk disabled

I just changes the /etc/fstab entry from

/dev/sda3		/		reiserfs	noatime		0 1

to

/dev/sda3		/		reiserfs	noatime		0 0

I didnt enable the Process Accounting part so some short-lived process may not appear in the bootchart images. Ill try this next and see if I anything interesting.