Linux boot in five seconds

At the Linux Plumbers Conference, two hackers, Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok, demonstrated two Linux systems at once, each of which was loaded faster than five seconds . In the first version, a modified version of the Fedora distribution was used, and in the second, a modified Moblin. In both cases, the hackers optimized the work of the kernel (from the above link, as well as in this interview, you can find out all the details of what they did).

The developers claim that the result is shown without any tricks: the end of the download is recorded only when the CPU is released and the read operation from the disk stops. The download itself does not include network logon times, but includes NetworkManager downloads.

Asynchronous initialization of iron allowed to accelerate the loading of the kernel to 1.02 s (on the 2.6.28 kernel, they will reduce the time to 0.5 s). Further loading went in parallel streams.
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As the iron used Asus EEE PC with SSD-drive. If you run the same modified distribution on a machine with a regular hard disk, the download speed is approximately doubled (on the ThinkPad notebook it took 10 seconds).

At the same time, the standard process for downloading these Linux distributions takes about 40 seconds to optimize: here is the process download schedule for Fedora and a similar schedule for Ubuntu .