ulyssesonline.com

Ubuntu 10.04 is aiming for a sub 10 second boot time. Canonical plans to take an aggressive approach to next year’s release to achieve its goal. Improvements to the Xorg display, to how root file systems are mounted, to suppressing the splash screen and progress bar are just a few things that are being considered. Ubuntu has already made dramatic changes to the boot time the last few releases.

Ubuntu 8.10 = 65 seconds
Ubuntu 9.04 = 25 seconds
Ubuntu 9.10 = < 25 seconds
Ubuntu 10.04 = < 10 seconds