The Other Issue With Ubuntu 11.10: Boot Speed

On top of the overall performance improvements, Ubuntu 11.10 is also exciting for the Radeon stack due to the new hardware support (Llano, etc) and other newly implemented features. Aside from ATI/AMD Radeon hardware, this is the first Ubuntu release that's shipping with the Nouveau Gallium3D driver by default so there's finally open-source 3D hardware acceleration "out of the box" for NVIDIA hardware. On the Intel side there's also performance improvements, proper Sandy Bridge support, initial Ivy Bridge support, and much more. For more details on the graphics topic, see The Graphics Stack, Requirements For Ubuntu 11.10. There are some nice changes in this release cycle for both open and closed-source drivers in Ubuntu Oneiric.

Unfortunately, the EXT4 write performance seems to be down a bit in Ubuntu 11.10 compared to Ubuntu 11.04 and earlier. The read performance has not changed much, but for this Intel system and others I have noticed slight performance degradations in some HDD-based systems with EXT4 on Ubuntu 11.10. This does not appear to be widespread or too common, however. Btrfs is still an install-time option for Ubuntu, but it will not become the default file-system until Ubuntu 12.10 or later.