Fedora 18 Systemd Boot Performance Is Mixed

In addition to open-source graphics driver benchmarking, another area being explored with the recent release of Fedora 18 is the boot performance. Here's some initial results from three systems compared to the Spherical Cow's predecessor.

Intel last week conveniently released 13 Linux benchmarks last week to the public using the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. With these new public tests, three of them come down to interfacing with systemd-analyze for looking at the system's boot performance: systemd-boot-kernel, systemd-boot-total, and systemd-boot-userspace. With the unique and extensible testing architecture offered by the Phoronix Test Suite, it's simply a matter of executing a command like phoronix-test-suite benchmark systemd-boot-total to run the automated benchmark.

These systemd boot measurement scripts in the Phoronix Test Suite were used to gauge the Fedora 18 boot performance on three different Intel 64-bit systems relative to Fedora 17. Both Linux operating systems were cleanly installed and with stock packages/settings. First up are results from the different Intel Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge" Extreme Edition and Intel Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" systems.

First up is the kernel boot time as measured with systemd on the i7-3960X and i7-3770K systems on Fedora 17 and Fedora 18.

The kernel boot time on both Intel Linux systems were cut in half when moving from Fedora 17 to Fedora 18.