Which Linux Distribution Boots The Fastest? An 11-Way Linux Comparison

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Which Linux Distribution Boots The Fastest? An 11-Way Linux Comparison

Following my recent tests of looking at the Ubuntu boot times from Linux 4.6 to 4.15 kernels, a request came in to look at the out-of-the-box boot performance on various Linux distributions. Here is a look at how the out-of-the-box Linux boot performance compares for 11 different distributions.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=25570

[tildearrow]

Typo:

Linux 4.14 kermel,

[oldgaro]

Arch Linux, Gentoo and Void can do better! ...systemd is a virus!

[roothorick]

It's kinda crazy to me that Ubu 16.04 ranked so high. It's something I'd think of as "old". Maybe that works to its advantage.

[xpris]

OpenMandriva have now faster boot time in new release OpenMandriva LX 3.03. In press note:
"

]With it you’ll get even faster booting than before, so fast in fact that it’s sometimes quicker than the BIOS!
Even the live image boots faster than before."

Maybe someday I see OpenMandriva in test in Phoronix. I hope Anyway thanks for nice comparison Michael

[matthewtrescott]

It's interesting. I suppose even the different ways of generating the initramfs makes a difference. At least on Arch with the systemd mkinitcpio hook there are no shell scripts executed in the initramfs. That probably helps with boot performance. Plus Ubuntu seems to rely heavily on systemd-sysv-compat in my experience.

[caligula]

"The reported firmware time didn't yield too much of a difference."

Eh, the results differ betwen 9522 and 11645 ms. that's over 2 seconds. How does the distro have any effect on this? Isn't this 100% UEFI, not Linux?

[sidro]

openSUSE use by default wickd which is slow like a hell. Replace wickd with network manager. After that the boot will be really fast.

Startup finished in 1.931s (kernel) + 1.598s (initrd) + 2.806s (userspace) = 6.336s

[andrei_me]

In this particular system, what would count as firmware time? Michael

[caligula]

In this particular system, what would count as firmware time? Michael

This might give some idea: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Sof...aderInterface/

Again, I'd say this test is yet again totally wrong and misleading. The firmware + loader time isn't distro specific. Of course you get shitty boot time if the boot loader menu stays active for 10 seconds on distro X and 1 seconds on distro Y. Also if the UEFI spends time training RAM modules on one occasion and got fixed the next day, the first tested distro would get bad results. I'm really disappointed with this.