"Quite a few of the commits for the main development branch, however, don't really belong to any of the topics discussed in the series so far and as a result, haven't yet been mentioned. In other cases, the kernel developers have made minor, but significant changes to some kernel areas, after we had covered them.
"For example, we haven't mentioned some of the changes introduced by Intel developer Arjan van de Ven to speed up hardware initialisation and booting (see 1, 2, 3, 4). Van de Ven used these and several other changes rejected by Linus Torvalds on a netbook that only required five seconds for starting Linux in a demonstration at the Linux Plumbers Conference. With the majority of systems, however, Linux 2.6.28 will start up only marginally faster, despite the fastboot patches, as the popular mainstream distributions waste most of their time initialising userspace services and loading the log-in manager and desktop environment."
