Did Ubuntu 10.04 Achieve Its Ten Second Boot Goal?

Canonical expressed their plans to achieve a ten-second boot time in June of last year for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, with their reference system being a Dell Mini 9 netbook. In February, we last checked on Ubuntu's boot performance and found it close, but not quite there yet, but did they end up hitting this goal for the final release of the Lucid Lynx? Well, from our tests, not quite. We tested out a near-final version of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on three netbooks -- including a Dell Mini 9 -- and the boot speed is not quite in the single digits.

Our tests were simple, we performed clean installations of an Ubuntu 10.04 LTS snapshot on three netbooks: the Dell Mini 9, Samsung NC10, and ASUS Eee PC 1201N. After installing Ubuntu i386 to each netbook (except for the x86_64 edition with the ASUS 1201N as it has a 64-bit Intel CPU), we did not adjust any settings or install/remove any packages besides putting on Bootchart. After that, we rebooted each system three times and then took the third Bootchart result. We also repeated this same testing under Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" on the same hardware for reference purposes.

Found on the Dell Mini 9 is an Intel Atom N270 processor, Intel 945GME graphics, 1GB of system memory, and an STEC PATA 8GB SSD. The Samsung NC10 netbook is equipped with an Intel Atom N270 processor, Intel 945GME graphics, 2GB of system memory, and a 32GB OCZ Core Series SSD. The ASUS Eee PC 1201N boasts a dual-core Intel Atom 330 CPU, a NVIDIA MCP79 motherboard, 2GB of system memory, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M ION graphics, and a 250GB Hitachi HTS54502 HDD. For those out of the loop, the packaged specs on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is the Linux 2.6.32 kernel (but with Linux 2.6.33 DRM back-ports), GNOME 2.30.0, X.Org Server 1.7.6, xf86-video-intel 2.9.1, xf86-video-nouveau 0.0.15, and the EXT4 file-system.

On the next page are the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS boot results.