Ubuntu 11.04 Boot Performance Compared To Past Releases

[conorsulli]

These are not regressions. Software regressions are bugs; these are simply unfortunate side-effects from using a new desktop environment, namely Unity.

Interesting info otherwise, though. Thanks.

Unity boots faster on 11.04 than classic desktop in 11.04 for me, even after clearing ureadahead to preload the correct environment..

They are regressions , not linked to Unity. Unity is fast and was designed to be light - if anything that is one thing it does do, whatever side you bat from.

[disi]

Ridiculous, I can boot Linux in 7 second (to the desktop, with postponed services once Qt and KDElibs are done loading) on a 5400rpm hdd on my laptop and they can't do it in less then 20 sec on a 3x faster SSD...

All they do in Ubuntu is not needed to boot corectly, udev is nice, but it is possible to replicate its features with a bash script sniffing dmesd hardware initalization until it is ready to start, some for urandom and some other. Using python at boot is also not the best choice in the world, it's nice, but slow to start. GDM is totally useless 95% of the time and is about 30mb. It take 17 lines of C to replicate the core functionalities (user switching and envvar init) or we can use "login", but it need to start quite late in the process. By starting very few services while preloading X is the best. Dbus and sysfs are needed for advanced DE, but not with minimals one.

this is a Ubuntu only thread, I guess. So you cannot just say abandon gdm. Also, gdm needs to start a lot of libraries for accessibility features and language support etc.
If you want to build a distribution for everyone, that means you have to include every possibility.

My Gentoo laptop has an SSD and boots in ~4-5seconds with openrc. There was a discussion to move to something else, I am wondering if systemd would be faster?

[FunkyRider]

Are't they supposed to release this by tomorrow? Sounds like an overall failure to me.

[bobwya]

Are't they supposed to release this by tomorrow? Sounds like an overall failure to me.

No it is just an intermediate release... Inteprid had a kernel I needed (for SATA PM support) but also had a whopper memory leak (in x64 version) that didn't receive any backported fixes. 9.04 had that nightmare (for older ATI users) Xorg update... If you want a good stable release then always go for the LTS ones!

Anyway complaining about slow boots should see how slow my Server boots with the Silicon Image SATA HCI driver. With multiple SATA drives (connected via port-multipliers) my boot time (on a dual-Opteron 2.6Ghz socket 940 system) is running into 2 minutes (that's just for the kernel - then I've got to start the desktop manager, etc.) Off to make a cup of tea... Just glad I don't need to reboot very often!