Ubuntu 11.04 Boot Performance Compared To Past Releases

Now that we have looked at the Ubuntu power consumption going back as far as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (and found serious power regressions), the next round of testing is providing the Bootchart results for five different systems also going back as far as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

Following a clean install of each operating system and leaving the system in its clean state with stock settings (and packages) aside from installing Bootchart, the Bootchart result was gathered after two reboots. For all releases it was the time measured to the automatic log-in. Again, the key mobile test systems included:

ThinkPad R52: 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

ThinkPad T60: Intel Core Duo T2400 dual-core, Lenovo 2613EJU motherboard SKU with Intel 945 + ICH7M chipset, 1GB of system memory, 80GB Hitachi HTS541080G9SA00, and ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 128MB graphics.

ThinkPad T61: Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 dual-core (x86_64), Lenovo 6459CTO SKU, Intel PM965 + ICH8M-E chipset, 4GB of system memory, 100GB Hitachi SATA HDD HTS72201, and NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M graphics.

Samsung NC10: Intel Atom N270, Intel 945GME + ICH7-M, 2GB of system memory, 32GB OCZ Core SSD, and Intel i945 graphics.

ASUS Eee PC 1201N: Intel Atom 330 dual-core + Hyper Threading, ASUS 1201N motherboard with MCP79 chipset, 2GB of system memory, 250GB HTS54502 SATA HDD, and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics.

The key Ubuntu information to recap is Ubuntu 8.04.4 LTS with the Linux 2.6.24 kernel, 8.10 Intrepid with Linux 2.6.27, 9.04 Jaunty with Linux 2.6.29, 9.10 Karmic with Linux 2.6.31, 10.04.2 LTS Lucid with Linux 2.6.32, 10.10 Maverick with Linux 2.6.35, and 11.04 Beta 2 with the Linux 2.6.38 kernel. The 64-bit Ubuntu release was tested on the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 and ASUS Eee PC 1201N where x86_64 is supported but for the other notebooks they were limited to 32-bit testing. The other important item to note with the boot testing is between Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10 is when the switch to the EXT4 file-system took place from EXT3.

The results for each system are reported on the following pages. The Bootchart graphs are also available for those who wish to further analyze the boot process for each release.