Ten years ago (2009), Ubuntu Desktop had a plan to boot fast.
According to the Ubuntu Wiki, Ubuntu had met the goal switching to the replacement init called Upstart in 9.10 (Karmic) and following that, Ubuntu had a target for achieving the the 10-second boot milestone in 10.04 (Lucid).
With our goal of switching to upstart in 9.10 met, we can now focus on achieving the 10sec boot milestone we set for Lucid. We will switch to a Dell Mini 10v with SSD as our reference platform and regularly report results on a daily basis. Time and bootchart results for both SSD and HDD storage will be posted […]
A target like 10s means we need a budget for each major component of the boot sequence:
- Kernel: 2s, including initramfs
- Plumbing: 2s, driver loading, filesystem mounting, core services
- X: 2s, including gdm
- Desktop: 4s, everything else
FoundationsTeam/BootPerformance (last edited 2009-11-26 16:49:47 by robbie.w)
These details are most likely based on this message by Scott from Ubuntu developer list, which was found via this dated article on Ars Technica. The other link to the UDS presentation is no longer valid, but a copy can be found on the Ubuntu Wiki (see the following quoted source).
Slide 18:
Can we really do this?Notes: This is going to be hard đ
On the last night of the Berlin sprint, I put together a
proof-of-concept to see whether this was possible.Slide 19:
Notes under slide: It is.
— Source: Scott James Remnant's UDS Karmic Presentation via Ubuntu Wiki
The UDS presentation had hinted that 10-second boot was possible, except that was only a proof-of-concept. Looking back at the milestone ten years later today, there does not seem to be any documented outcome of whether Ubuntu had successfully boot in ten seconds or otherwise. Then again, was the milestone merely an experiment or intended as a real feature–not sure either.
So what happened to the 10-second boot milestone–any documented outcome; else, what do we know about Ubuntu boot performance back then?
Best Answer
That goal was achieved.
It is possible (and has been for a while): my system boots in 12.3 seconds. That includes MySQL so I can forgive them the extra 2.3s. Get a quick SSD as a boot up disk and remove any services you do not really need and you too can get a 10 second-ish boot.
Biggest hurdle during boot tends to be the wireless for notebooks. You can speed that up a little bit with some tweaking.
Mind though that the one thing that happened in between was that Canonical dropped their own start up (upstart) system and Unity so we got the regular "systemd". At that moment they also no longer have any influence on the boot time anymore (besides disabling default services). Besides that hardware also caught up with them: the introduction of SSDs makes tweaking your operating system to start up quicker useless... you never get any noticeable improvement that you get when you use an SSD.