"One of the biggest complaints about Linux, particularly from
developers, is the speed with which Linux boots. By default, Linux
is a general-purpose operating system that can serve as a client
desktop or server right out of the box. Because of this
flexibility, Linux serves a wide base but is suboptimal for any
particular configuration. This article shows you options to
increase the speed with which Linux boots, including two options
for parallelizing the initialization process. It also shows you how
to visualize graphically the performance of the boot process.
"A common complaint about GNU/Linux (other than its lack of a
reasonable kernel debugger) is the amount of time the operating
system takes to start. You could sum up this process as booting,
but in fact several independent tasks are involved to evolve from a
cold system to one that you can interact with through a shell or
window manager. Let's review the Linux boot and initialization
process..."