Improving Mandriva's Boot Performance

Last week we published an article looking at the ASUS Eee PC 901 Linux boot performance. In that article we had compared how long it took to boot Linux (using the excellent Bootchart program) for Fedora 9, Fedora 10 Alpha, Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 6, and Mandriva 2009 Beta 2. Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 6 ended up being the hands-down winner, but the team at Mandriva have been working on optimizing their boot process and some of these improvements can now be found in their most recent Mandriva 2009 test release.

Fred Crozat, who heads Mandriva's French engineering team, has written a blog entry that explains in detail some of the work they have accomplished. These boot improvements include not waiting for the network to startup for D-Bus or the display manager, eliminating the creation of legacy ptys by the kernel, enhancing initrd, and improving udev.

Fred's blog post about the Mandriva 2009 boot-time optimizations can be read here.