xload
More info
- Creator
- K. Shane Hartman, Stuart A. Malone
- Type
- X client
- License
- MIT
- Source
- gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/app/xload
A scrolling bar chart of the system load average, refreshed every ten seconds since the days of X10.
The program plots the load average as a histogram in the Athena StripChart widget, with one scale line per whole unit of load and a new sample every ten seconds. K. Shane Hartman and Stuart Malone wrote it at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science, with additions from Jim Gettys and Bob Scheifler among others, and it already existed for X10. With -remote host it shows another machine's load through the rwhod database.
Its best-known quirk was a security one: on older Unix systems the load was obtained by reading kernel memory through /dev/kmem, so xload was installed setgid kmem, a small graph program with the right to read the whole kernel. Linux solved that with /proc/loadavg. Keeping xload visible in a corner was a way of seeing that the machine was still alive, much like uptime without having to ask.