Initcall Debug

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Introduction

Passing the initcall_debug option on the kernel command line will cause timing information to be printed to the console for each initcall. initcalls are used to initialize statically linked kernel drivers and subsystems and contribute a significant amount of time to the Linux boot process. The output looks like this:

calling ipc_init+0x0/0x28 @ 1
msgmni has been set to 42
initcall ipc_init+0x0/0x28 returned 0 after 1872 usecs

You can use 'dmesg' to see the boot messages after the kernel has booted. With a sort 'sed' script, you can reorder the final 'timing' line, and sort the initcalls numerically by duration. Here is a command to do this:

dmesg -s 128000 | grep "initcall" | sed "s/(.*\)after\(.*\)/\2 \1/g" | sort -n

Notes

Using initcall_debug increases the amount of messages produced by the kernel during system boot. It's a good idea to increase the printk log buffer size to avoid overflowing the log buffer. To do this, increase the value of CONFIG_lOGBUF_SHIFT from 14 to 18. This increases the log buffer from the default size of 16k to 256K.