Ubuntu 9.04's blazing boot times

David M Williams
Thursday, 15 January 2009 06:34

Opinion and Analysis

Marius Nestor at Softpedia was keen to know so he set up two machines: one with an AMD Sempron 1.8GHz, 80GB IDE HDD and 512Mb RAM, and the other an Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 2.2GHz, 250GB SATA HDD and 4Gb RAM.

He set up three Ubuntu installs on each, one with Ubuntu 8.10 and the ext3 filesystem, and two with Ubuntu 9.04 alpha, but one using ext3 and the other ext4.

His test results were as follows:

System one, Ubuntu 8.10, ext3: boots in 31.8 seconds
System one, Ubuntu 9.04 alpha, ext3: boots in 28.3 seconds
System one, Ubuntu 9.04 alpha, ext4: boots in 23.1 seconds

System two, Ubuntu 8.10, ext3: boots in 26.8 seconds
System two, Ubuntu 9.04 alpha, ext3: boots in 24.5 seconds
System two, Ubuntu 9.04 alpha, ext4: boots in 21.4 seconds

Marius calculated boot times from the moment the GRUB boot loader appeared on the screen and until the login manager was displayed. These results are very interesting. On the Sempron system almost nine seconds were cut from a current Ubuntu 8.10 system to a new 9.04 with ext4 one, which is a reduction by over 30%.

On the Intel system, the boot time was cut by 5.4 seconds, which is still approaching a 20% reduction.

What would be extremely interesting is to compare ext4 to NTFS but sadly there’s neither a good ext4 implementation for Windows or a good NTFS implementation for Linux.

For Linux users, however, the news is definitely good. ext4 looks set to offer greater file performance along with greater reliability and stability.

What’s more, while ext3 was designed well before the advent of SSDs, ext4 is fully cognoscente of such drives. ext4 does include smarts to maximise the lifetime of solid state drives and thus ought theoretically to offer a boost to netbooks without any corresponding fear of a shortened lifetime.

Here's to Ubuntu 9.04 and better disk speed ... I'll drink to that !