The Other Issue With Ubuntu 11.10: Boot Speed

There is the earlier numbers from bare metal for those interested. Among the numbers there is over a 20 second increase in boot time for an Atom netbook, over a 30 second regression for an Atom nettop, an AMD Opteron system took nearly 42% longer to boot, and an Intel Sandy Bridge system also took nearly 40% longer to boot Ubuntu 11.10 than Ubuntu 11.04.

The rest of this article has results from Ubuntu 11.10 using an Intel Core i7 990X Extreme "Gulftown" system. There have not been any Phoronix tests of this impressive $1000 USD CPU in a few months due to a motherboard failure, but now it's up and running with an MSI X58M (MS-7593) motherboard. This system with six cores plus Hyper Threading had 3GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon HD 4870 graphics card, and a 160GB Western Digital WD1600JS-00M SATA HDD.

Ubuntu 10.10 on the 12-thread Intel system with SATA HDD booted in 16.73 seconds, Ubuntu 11.04 booted in 16.36 seconds, and with Ubuntu 11.04 it's set to boot in about 18 seconds, or roughly a 10% increase over its predecessor.

For this particular Intel Gulftown system, the power consumption when idling has not increased from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10. However, when the Radeon GPU with the default open-source driver is being utilized, the power consumption under load is up noticeably compared to Ubuntu 11.04 and 10.10. Running OpenArena on the system with Ubuntu 11.10 causes 7.6% more power to be consumed (as measured by the Watts Up USB power meter interfacing with the Phoronix Test Suite) than Ubuntu 11.04. The open-source Radeon Linux driver still lacks full power management support (and does have some dynamic clocking support, but it's not enabled by default); however, with Ubuntu 11.10 the driver is consuming more power when comparing the stock configurations.