I’ve been interested in the way different distributions handle boot time lately, and with openSUSE’s recent and very impressive boot time improvements I thought I’d make a few extra comparative statistics using bootchart.

Rules

To ensure that these results are reasonably fair, I’m posing a few restrictions, most of which are pretty obvious:

  • Use the same setup, my laptop, a Vaio VGN-FE11S.
  • Local user, IP by DHCP
  • Completely default setup, no system updates. As the openSUSE article mentions, updates can really change the speed of boot time since the files you need to access will be fragmented over the hard disk.
  • Time recorded will have to be the time until the KDM screen loads, with no auto-login.
  • No extra partitions mounted at boot.

The Results and Bootcharts

So the distributions I tried are openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1, Fedora 7, PCLinuxOS 2007, Kubuntu Tribe 4 and Mandriva 2008 Beta 1. What I found was that there was very little, if anything, between the boot up times of the various distributions. On my laptop however, openSUSE 10.3 Beta 1 came out as the fastest with the same impressive 27s!

Here is the run-down with bootcharts:

Now, though this is certainly an indication of boot time speed, boot time speeds can vary quite a bit on different hardware. There would be nothing impossible about different results on different hardware. That said, I would be very interested in seeing any comparisons on other hardware, so if you have some (from a default installation), please do share them as well.

In other exciting news, openSUSE 10.3 Beta 2 is scheduled to be released later today :-)

Edit: Digg, Beta 2 now out.