Intel Moblin V2 Core Alpha: It Boots Fast!

Booting Moblin V2 Core Alpha on the modified Samsung NC10 took about seven or eight seconds, though according to Bootchart it takes about 13 seconds, but that's because the Bootchart initird needs to be loaded. Intel engineers feel that boot times over 5 seconds using non-rotating media is unacceptable and are confident that the boot time can be trimmed. They still have a bit of work left to do, but so far, things are looking good!

For comparison we performed clean installs of both Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10 on the Samsung NC10 netbook. The amount of time it took to boot the stock Ubuntu 8.10 installation was 30 seconds. Booting Fedora 10 on the same system took 36 seconds, which is about three times longer than booting Moblin V2 Core.

It is possible that Moblin V2 Core can boot even faster once creating your own spin using the new Moblin Image Creator. Intel's goal with Moblin is to boot Atom-powered devices in about five seconds, which has almost been reached. Booting into Moblin V2 Core on an SSD is almost as fast as booting into SplashTop or Phoenix HyperSpace. Improving the Linux boot performance is one of the goals for Ubuntu 9.04, a quick-boot OS is being developed by gOS, and has been worked on by Mandriva and other distribution vendors. For further reading, check out our ASUS Eee PC boot performance benchmarks, Measuring Ubuntu's Boot Performance, and Measuring Fedora's Boot Performance. In various Phoronix articles we also have Intel Atom benchmarks using the Phoronix Test Suite.

We will be back with more Intel Moblin tests at Phoronix in the near future. There is still quite a bit of work left before Moblin V2 Core will be finalized, but if you are interested in checking out the latest alpha release head on over to Moblin.org.