Booting With Mandriva's Speedboot

Above is a video of the normal boot process on the Samsung NC10 with Mandriva 2009.1 beta. Below is a video of the same Mandriva installation on the netbook but with Speedboot enabled.

If you take note of the times in the video, it is about 16 seconds until you see the display manager under the normal boot process, but about 10 seconds with Speedboot.

Speedboot in Mandriva will makes the system looks like its booting faster, but in fact, it is just delaying some of the work until after the display manager has started and not starting some of the services at all. Speedboot will not work if you rely upon an encrypted file-system (something we certainly recommend for mobile users) or network-based authentication. Without Speedboot, Mandriva 2009.1 booted in 27 seconds, which is actually six seconds longer than what it took to boot Ubuntu 9.04 on the same netbook. Moblin V2 Core Alpha was able to boot on the same netbook in about 10 seconds!

Improving the Linux boot-time and making it a more pleasurable experience by having it be flicker-free and appealing through projects like Red Hat's Plymouth is becoming quite common among Linux distribution vendors. Beyond Moblin being the fastest booting distribution we have come across, as to what mainstream desktop distribution will deliver the best and fastest-booting experience is still to be decided.