Last month we had measured Ubuntu's boot performance via the open-source Bootchart utility and had done this on all Ubuntu releases between Ubuntu 6.06 LTS and the latest development build at the time for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. From this testing we had found the boot time to decrease with each official release and the maximum disk throughput increasing. With Fedora 9 Sulphur due out next month, we have done this same boot performance testing on the Fedora side with Core 4, Core 5, Core 6, 7, 8, and 9 Rawhide.

Unlike Ubuntu that has Bootchart available in its main repository, Fedora does not offer an RPM version of Bootchart in its repository. From the Bootchart website though is a source RPM. The Bootchart source RPM can be built with rpmbuild --rebuild bootchart-0.9-1.src.rpm once having installed the ant and jakarta-commons-cli (available from the JPackage.org repository) dependencies -- and of course the RPM build tools. Once the resulting Bootchart RPM is installed, when rebooting the system you must select the "Bootchart Logging" option within GRUB. Once the system has booted, the Bootchart results are stored in /var/log/bootchart.tgz. By running bootchart bootchart.tgz in the same directory, the results will be parsed and an SVG image of the results will be rendered. We had described Bootchart in detail in the previous article, so check that out for more details.

We had recorded the boot results for Fedora Core 4, Fedora Core 5, Fedora Core 6, Fedora 7, Fedora 8, and Fedora 9 Rawhide from March 8. We had used the DVD installation discs for each Fedora release and had used the default package selection and settings, with the only real change being disabling Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) and installing Boot Chart. We had used the same notebook for testing that was used in our Ubuntu Boot Performance article. The hardware consisted of an Intel Pentium M 750 processor, 2GB of DDR2-533 memory, ATI mobility Radeon X300 64MB, and an 80GB IDE 5400RPM hard drive. The notebook was a Lenovo ThinkPad R52.

Fedora Core 4 "Stentz" had shipped with the Linux 2.6.11 kernel and X.Org 6.8.2, Fedora Core 5 "Bordeaux" with Linux 2.6.15 and X.Org 7.0, Fedora Core 6 "Zod" with Linux 2.6.18 and X.Org 7.1, Fedora 7 "Moonshine" with Linux 2.6.21 and X.Org 7.2, Fedora 8 "Werewolf" with Linux 2.6.23 and X.Org 7.3, and Fedora 9 Rawhide at this time ships with a Linux 2.6.25 RC kernel and X Server 1.5 development version.

Fedora Core 4 had a boot time of 52 seconds and a maximum disk throughput of 13 MB/s. Fedora Core 5 was also at 52 seconds but with a throughput of 29 MB/s. Fedora Core 6 had slowed down in our testing to 59 seconds (it did have more processes running at start-up than FC4 and FC5) while its disk throughput was high at 28MB/s.

Fedora 7 had crawled at start-up with a boot time of 87 seconds! It's maximum disk throughput had dropped to 15MB/s and there were even more processes running at start-up than Fedora Core 6. Fortunately, in Fedora 8 the boot time dramatically decreased and was back down to 51 seconds. Its throughput, however, was 12MB/s. The boot time for Fedora 9 Rawhide was 66 seconds. It's important to note that Rawhide/development versions of Fedora are slower than the official releases due to kernel debugging messages, etc being enabled. The maximum disk throughput had slumped to 8MB/s.

For easy comparison, below are graphs comparing the boot time and maximum disk throughput for Fedora Core 4 to Fedora 9 Rawhide.

While Ubuntu's boot performance has been improving with each release, this hasn't exactly been the case for Fedora. The boot time has only remained the same and increase in some releases. However, between Fedora Core 4 and Fedora 9 there has been a lot of reform within this camp that lives on the leading edge of Red Hat technologies and the merging of the Core and Extras repositories. Fedora 8 takes about twice as long as Ubuntu 7.10 to boot on the same notebook, but Fedora starts up by default with many more processes. Right now Fedora 9 Rawhide is booting slower than Fedora 8, but by the time Fedora 9 "Sulphur" is released we expect its boot time will decrease.