Why Dell Should Upgrade Past Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

In early 2008 we had measured Ubuntu's boot performance, which looked at the boot performance going back to all Ubuntu releases since Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS, but this is our first time looking closely at Ubuntu's boot performance with Intel Atom hardware. With each Ubuntu release we had installed Bootchart for recording and analyzing the startup process. Below are our Bootchart graphs from Ubuntu 8.04.2 LTS, 8.10, and 9.04.

The measured boot time on Ubuntu 8.04.2 was 27 seconds, 32 seconds for Ubuntu 8.10, and an impressive 14 seconds for our Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty snapshot. With the newest Ubuntu release, the boot speed is over twice as quick! Ubuntu 9.04 actually has more processes that startup by default, but the boot time has been shaved dramatically, which has been one of the development goals for the Jaunty Jackalope release.

The maximum disk throughput with Ubuntu 8.04.2 was 74MB/s, 57MB/s for Ubuntu 8.10, and 67MB/s for Ubuntu 9.04. With some tuning we could likely see Ubuntu boot on this Atom-powered HDD-driven netbook in ten seconds or less. Of course, using Intel Moblin V2 we could likely already see such figures.