Linux Kernel Boot Statistics: 2.6.24 To 2.6.39

Recently there were benchmarks on Phoronix looking at the Ubuntu 11.04 boot performance relative to past Ubuntu Linux releases. This was done with five mobile systems and going back as far as Ubuntu 8.04. The tests showed around Ubuntu 10.04 LTS was where the boot performance in Ubuntu's been the best but Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 have slowed down a bit in how fast it's reaching the desktop. In this article we are looking at the boot performance when simply changing out the kernels. Every kernel from Linux 2.6.24 to 2.6.39-rc4 was analyzed.

A clean installation of Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS was done on two systems and the boot time of every Linux kernel release from 2.6.24 to present (2.6.39-rc4) was measured using Bootchart. The kernel was the only change made each time to the system.

ThinkPad R52 Notebook: Intel Pentium M 1.86GHz single-core, IBM 18494WU motherboard SKU with Intel Mobile i915 + ICH6M chipset, 2GB of system memory, 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9AT00 IDE HDD, ATI Mobility Radeon X300 graphics

Core 2 Desktop: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.87GHz, Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R, 2GB DDR3 system memory, 160GB Western Digital SATA HDD, and ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics.

The ThinkPad had the 32-bit Ubuntu release and kernel while the Core 2 Duo desktop was using the 64-bit release. An EXT3 file-system was used with each release.

For easy reproducibility, the Ubuntu mainline Linux kernel package repository was used for obtaining each stable release.