Comment 3 for bug 1763584

My system is being affected as well, I'm running Ubuntu 16.04.4 having the same service failing to start.

There are a few reports of this on stackexchange as well with one particular solution about patching the kernel:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/308801/ureadahead-error-while-tracing-possible-kernel-patch-problem.

I've also filed a bug with kernel.org : https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=199861

Running ureadahead with strace directly from terminal yields:

# strace ureadahead --verbose --force-trace /

[..]
openat(3, "events/fs/do_sys_open/enable", O_RDWR) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
close(3) = 0
write(2, "ureadahead: Error while tracing:"..., 59ureadahead: Error while tracing: No such file or directory
[..]

and "/sys/kernel/debug/tracing/events/fs/do_sys_open/enable" does not exist.