"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."
