Improving boot time has been a focus of Ubuntu developers in recent releases, with the goal of a ten-second startup set for Ubuntu 10.4.  To test progress thus far, I compared boot performance for Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 and 9.10.  Below are the results, which demonstrate the impressive strides that have been made thus far towards a faster boot.

It has been well-documented that Ubuntu’s readahead system during boot significantly cuts down on boot time by reducing hard disk seeking via precaching commonly-used files during bootup. This feature, however, only lasts up to the GDM screen.

By the time Ubuntu 10.04 LTS rolls around next April, Canonical is interested in seeing Ubuntu boot on an Intel Atom netbook (specifically the Dell Mini 9) in less than ten seconds. These incredibly fast boot time goals even led Canonical to decide against investing more time in enhancing the boot experience with Red Hat's Plymouth.

Compare to earlier ubuntu versions karmic is much better in speed but if you still want to reduce your boot times use ubuntu boot Packages containing instrumentation to aid in boot performance work, and packages proposed to improve performance.

Canonical expressed their plans to achieve a ten-second boot time in June of last year for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with their reference system being a Dell Mini 9 netbook. In February, we last checked on Ubuntu's boot performance and found it close, but not quite there yet, but did they end up hitting this goal for the final release of the Lucid Lynx?

In December we wrote that Ubuntu 10.04 already shortened the boot time, which has been a great focus amongst Canonical and Ubuntu developers as they strive for a ten second boot. A lot has changed since that article.

What's new in Ubuntu 9.04 Beta? Well, a lot! First of all, the developers improved the boot process even further and now Ubuntu 9.04 Beta (with the EXT4 filesystem) will boot in under 20 seconds on a high-end machine!

When announcing Ubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope, Mark Shuttleworth had hoped to make this next Ubuntu Linux release perform better and to boot "blindingly quick", in particular with Ubuntu beginning to appear on more mobile devices. Well, with Alpha 4 have been released earlier this month, are Canonical developers and the community in the right direction with making Ubuntu 9.04 boot quickly?

Here's something silly. It seems like y'all are concentrating on boot times these days. Boot in 20 seconds! no, 15 seconds! no 10 seconds! Why the **** do I care?