ASUS Eee PC 901 Linux Boot Performance

With the Atom-based ASUS Eee PC 901 we have already delivered disk encryption benchmarks and a Linux distribution comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. This Intel 1.6GHz Diamondville processor isn't the fastest, but it's performing quite well for a netbook. With netbooks and their users often on the go though, for those not using the suspend and resume mode the boot time can be equally important as the in-desktop performance. To look at this we are delivering boot performance benchmarks for the Eee PC 901 from Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.10, and Mandriva 2009.

Specifically with this testing we had used the stock versions of Fedora 9, Fedora 10 Alpha, Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 6, and Mandriva 2009 Beta 2. Sadly since we had already formatted the Eee-optimized Xandros distribution (and no installation CDs are included with the Eee PC 901), we were unable to provide any boot metrics for the stock OS that ships on this Intel netbook computer. Fedora 9 uses the Linux 2.6.25 kernel while Mandriva was using the Linux 2.6.26 kernel and the other distributions were based off the latest Linux 2.6.27 bits.

For measuring the boot performance we had used Bootchart. Bootchart is able to monitor and then analyze the boot process on Linux systems by initializing its Bootchart logger from the GRUB boot-loader. Not only is the time monitored during the boot process but also monitored is the CPU usage and disk throughput along with all of the processes running. This information is then charted quite nicely.

Earlier this year we had used Bootchart to monitor the Fedora boot performance from Fedora Core 4 through Fedora 9. Additionally, we had monitored the Ubuntu boot performance going back to Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS.

The ASUS Eee PC 901 uses an Intel Atom N270 (1.60GHz) processor, Intel 945GME Chipset, 1GB of DDR2 memory, and 16+4GB ASUS-PHISON SSD drives. When installing each distribution to the Eee PC 901 we had left everything in its stock configuration aside from installing the Bootchart package for each distribution. No other changes were made following its installation.