Ubuntu/EXT4 Boots in 21.4 Seconds
by Jiang on Jan.15, 2009, under Computing
Support for the EXT4 filesystem started appearing in the Ubuntu 9.04 daily development images just a few days ago, and early adopters have been experiencing the speed and efficiency of this new format. Compared to EXT3, EXT4 shows marked performance improvements and pulled far ahead of the competition in many respects. Phoronix’s article on Ubuntu’s EXT4 support contains some technical benchmarks.
But what does this mean for us regular users? For one, we’ll now be able to store gargantuan files on the scale 16TB. While that feature would not be useful to most users, the faster read/write speeds would allow most applications to start and work faster. In particular, Softpedia reports a noticeable boot time improvement of 9 seconds, yielding a 21.4-second boot. While this may not seem very much, let’s remember that Ubuntu and the EXT4 module are still full of debugging code. Once that’s gone and everything else is stabilized, the system would work even better.
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January 24th, 2009 on 11:48 am
Seriously 21.4 seconds?? Woah now thats fast for Ubuntu…..any other new features in beta 3 or is just ext4 support??
March 9th, 2009 on 12:37 am
That’s faster than I get with an optimized kernel on 8.10. I wonder if the array repo has 9.04 support yet. If so, I should try this… 21.4 sec boot is awesome!
March 9th, 2009 on 1:19 am
I think there’s still quite a bit of work to get the boot times even smaller. We’ll see ;p
@Sonic: Often, you could install software from older repositories. It might be slightly risky, but I do it anyway and most of the time it works.
March 9th, 2009 on 3:40 pm
Well, except it’s the actual kernel, so that wouldn’t work…