When I boot with bootchart I have to stop it manually?

[enaut]

Hi, I compiled and installed your bootchart and the graphics it produces are very neat :D One thing though! It fails to stop automatically. I checked the start script. There are several programs listed as "stopping condition" one of them is gnome-terminal I added gdm and I have other programs from that list started. But bootchart stops only after issuing /sbin/bootchartd stop. What could be wrong? how does it scan for the processes?

best enaut

[xrmx]

hello, could please tell us which bootchart version and which distribution are you using?

[enaut]

Ok, Bootchart version is recent git ( f1130f3 ) Distribution is Gentoo but quite customized. The Thing I'm trying to visualize is systemd init system(in case you heard of it).

One think I can think of is: does bootchart rely on some init system runlevel variables? because it might be that systemd does not set those...

[enaut]

Ok I found the evil pice of code :D I'm not running on initrd but my /dev/ is generated using udev. So /dev/random does not exist in that early stage of boot.

So this test gives some false positives: if [ ! -e /dev/random ]; then IN_INITRD="yes"

if I remove that test it works just great for me! However I don't know about initrd setups. what is this distiction for? I can't find the reason for this if!

I fixed it for me in my fork enaut/bootchart@ff11038 enaut/bootchart@5488c804

[enaut]

Mhm I thought about it again... maybe a check for .linuxrc would be more apropriate?

[enaut]

Any comments?

Why is there a difference between initrd and normal boot?

[xrmx]

Please have a little bit of patience :) I have no clue about that code and no time to take a look at it at the moment.

[enaut]

ok so I will dive deeper into the code... and Try to find the sollution myself :)

[enaut]

I have currently no time to investigate this deeper. So here again my summary:

In the bootchartd script there is an "if" testing if in initrd. To do so it tests if the file /dev/random exists. However on modern kernels with modern distributions /dev is a tmpfs which is mounted only after the bootchartscript runs. So this test gives a false positive. For me this issue is solved if I remove the If completely. However I have no clue what this does to initrd users. That's why I tried to find a proper sollution for this test.

So open Questions so far:

• Is this test neccessary for initrd users?
• I so how to test properly for the initrd?
• maybe one could add a function to the binary as done for sleep? (I noticed there is already a check for initrd in the binary using some info from /proc/mounts but I had not benn able to use this so far as I'm not really in the code)

Thats it so far I'll just use my "fixed/hacked" version until someone fixes it or I have more time to fix it myself. And sorry xrmx I didn't mean to offend you! I just thought that might be a simple thing for you :D best enaut

[xrmx]

No offense :) My doubt is if the IN_INITRD is needed only for initrd or for initramfs too? in the first case we can just check for [ -x /linuxrc ] otherwise i don't know :)

[enaut]

Thats what I thought too but I don't really like the Idea to check for a file... But for initramfs I think we could check for /init as its the same and usually not present on non initrd/ramfs systems... But as already said I don't really like the Idea of checking for a File I'd rather parse /proc/mountinfo or something like that... but the problem there is that this stuff is too complex for my tight schedule so far...

[xrmx]

I've pushed what i consider the minimal fix which is checking for /init or /linbuxrc being available. Please check that it is working fine for your case and if it is feel free to close the issue. Sorry for taking so long.

[enaut]

Thanks a lot should work unfortunately I somewhat crashed my systemd system... But I'll test this as soon as it's fully up and running again.

[xrmx]

Systemd is known to work with bootchart2 after Harald fixes. Closing this.

[enaut]

Just to confirm it here! It runs just fine with my newly setup exherbo (gentoo like distro with nativ systemd) I had to replace pidof with pgrep though!

and many thanks for solving this :)