What is the purpose of grub-common.service?

Support & Help Requests
1

I’ve been tweaking my system’s startup time and came to a stand still with my investigation. Seemingly this service’s purpose is to log a successful grub bootup.

systemctl status grub-common.service
● grub-common.service - LSB: Record successful boot for GRUB
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/grub-common; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: active (exited) since Mon 2016-05-02 16:15:32 EDT; 48min ago
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
  Process: 863 ExecStart=/etc/init.d/grub-common start (code=exited, status=0/
    Tasks: 0 (limit: 512)

it’s at the tope of the “blame list”

systemd-analyze blame 12.628s grub-common.service

Can grub-common.service be safely disabled? I emphasize the word safely.

2

@wolfman do you have any insight here?

I tested on my test partition first, then on main. Both booted seemingly just fine - no indication of any failure in syslog.
I think my “tuning” has reached an end with these results …

pfeiffep@pfeiffep-Studio-1749:~$ systemd-analyze
Startup finished in 5.507s (kernel) + 24.899s (userspace) = 30.407s
pfeiffep@pfeiffep-Studio-1749:~$ systemd-analyze critical-chain
    graphical.target @24.889s
└─multi-user.target @24.868s
  └─ntp.service @21.932s +2.935s
    └─network-online.target @21.920s
      └─network.target @18.181s
        └─networking.service @10.432s +7.747s
          └─apparmor.service @3.430s +6.873s
            └─local-fs.target @3.428s
              └─run-cgmanager-fs.mount @11.889s
                └─local-fs-pre.target @3.428s
                  └─systemd-remount-fs.service @3.280s +102ms
                    └─systemd-journald.socket @1.133s
                      └─-.mount @1.108s
                        └─system.slice @1.133s
                          └─-.slice @1.108s
pfeiffep@pfeiffep-Studio-1749:~$ systemd-analyze blame
         11.481s irqbalance.service

I certainly don’t want to mess with irqs on a 4 threaded processor!

3

Sorry Peter but I don’t have a clue as I don’t mess with such things!. :frowning:

4

I disabled on startup … thus far have seen no ill effects! Any insight or comments @lah7 ?

systemctl status grub-common.service
● grub-common.service - LSB: Record successful boot for GRUB
   Loaded: loaded (/etc/init.d/grub-common; bad; vendor preset: enabled)
   Active: inactive (dead)
     Docs: man:systemd-sysv-generator(8)
5

I don't really know myself, but as it says:

● grub-common.service - LSB: Record successful boot for GRUB

It looks like it's just a simple logging service.

1 Like
6

Yes I agree about logging … I have it disabled on 2 pcs with no negative effects thus far. I also posted this in Ask Ubuntu and Ubuntu forums with no response as yet.

Update 5/9 no adverse effects to date … no response from either Ask Ubuntu or Ubuntu forums

1 Like
7

There are no ill effects thus far [5/11]
response received from AskUbuntu

snip
So in theory if you disable this service, every time you restart your
machine, grub menu will popup. Of course you can set up appropriate
timeouts in /etc/default/grub. Beware, if you set up too
low timeouts you might end up in the situation with cycling reboot and
overgrowing logs, which cannot be rotated or archived.
snip