Draft: Gutsy beta release announcement

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2007 at 06:15:25PM +0100, Dougie Richardson wrote:
>> I'm surprised both that you feel boot time is one of the biggest 
>> complaints
>> among users, and that you feel this has changed substantially in 7.10. Can
>> you expand on those premises?
>
> Biggest complaint: it's often stated in comparison articles, I believe it 
> was in the recent Mossberg article, although I could be wrong. It comes up 
> quite frequently in the forums and there are numerous howtos concerning 
> improving boot times on 7.04. Granted this may be more of a laptop issue,
>
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=62230

The only measurement I see in this thread is 42 seconds, which seems very
respectable.  The original post is complaining about Breezy(!).

> http://www.ubuntugeek.com/tag/feisty-slow-fix/

The only effect of this "fix" is to bring up the network interface later in
the boot process.  I would be curious to know who this helps and why.  This
is something which has changed in 7.10.

> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/2485

This is a collection of clearly unrelated issues, most of which appear to be
bugs.  The main issue being discussed is clearly an outlier (15 minutes to
boot).

> http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com/2007/04/yesterdays-update-slow-boot.html

This is disconcerting, as it suggests a regression in a 7.04 update.  It
claims there is a bug filed, but doesn't link to it or provide a bug number.
/etc/network/interfaces should never be modified by a stable update, though
if the user is using unofficial repositories, anything could happen.  It's
similar to "feisty-slow-fix" above in that it suggests fiddling with
/etc/network/interfaces.

> http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2114124,00.asp

It's true that marginal speedups in boot time can be achieved by disabling
boot scripts, though of course this disables functionality as well, and is
not something we would do by default.  The article doesn't say which version
of Ubuntu it refers to, but many of the scripts mentioned are not installed
by default in 7.04 or 7.10 (mdadm, lvm, portmap, nfs).

> http://ubuntu-utah.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=531989

This seems to refer to a system with only 160M of memory, running from a USB
disk.  I think that in this case, the boot time is slow due to hardware
shortcomings.

> Changed substantially: 7.10 is at least twice as fast as 7.04 is to install 
> and brings up GDM on boot around a minute faster than Fiesty, on my laptop 
> and desktop.

Would you mind sharing your measurements?  Were these both fresh
installations?  In my experience, a fresh installation will often boot more
quickly than one which has been updated over time.

While it's certainly possible that changes made to fix other issues have
also provided a faster boot, I would be very hesitant to promote this as a
feature of the release without a more concrete idea of the cause and
concrete measurements.

-- 
 - mdz