Ubuntu 11.10 vs. Fedora 16: Boot Speed, Power Consumption

The last notebook being measured today is the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 with an Intel Core i7 720QM quad-core CPU plus Hyper Threading and a 160GB Intel SSD (SSDSA2M160). For this Intel notebook that is still powerful by today's standards, Fedora 16 booted in 25.81 seconds. Ubuntu 11.10 managed to come in much faster at 12.24 seconds.

While some Phoronix readers and Phoronix Forums users thought that Fedora's increased usage of systemd would give it a lead in boot performance plus all of the other upstream optimizations and improvements made by the Fedora / Red Hat engineers, this was not the case in comparing Fedora 16 and Ubuntu 11.10. On the Atom netbook the boot speed was comparable between Ubuntu 11.10 and Fedora 16, while for the more powerful Intel notebooks with an HDD and SSD, the Ubuntu 11.10 boot speed was superior. This is a bit surprising because Ubuntu 11.10 has regressed hard on the boot speed, but had there not been this regressing since Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Oneiric Ocelot would have performed even better.