Owen Taylor threw down the gauntlet :
Currently, the time to boot the Linux desktop from the point where the power switch is turned on, to the point where the user can start doing work is roughly two minutes.
Ideally, system boot would involve a 3-4 second sequential read of around 100 megabytes of data from the hard disk, CPU utilization would be parallelized with that, and all queries on external systems would be asynchronous ... startup continues and once the external system responds, the system state is updated. Plausibly the user could start work under 10 seconds on this ideal system.
The challenge is to create a single poster showing graphically what is going on during the boot, what is the utilization of resources, how the current boot differs from the ideal world of 100% disk and CPU utilization, and thus, where are the opportunities for optimization.
Two days later Ziga Mahkovec posted some cool-looking results.
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Debian boot process
FYI, Jochen Voss was inspired by Ziga Mahkovec and inspected boot process of some Debian systems. The result is not as beautiful as Ziga's, though. Adrian von Bidder added that he has moved everything needed by interactive users early in the boot process, while moving things like postfix, apache, postgres, ... to the end. With this, he could already log in while the system was still booting.
ubuntu
And here's a discussion about Ubuntus boot process, completed with charts.