With this beta release everything should be shaping up nicely, and (theoretically) the work from this point onwards should be bug-fixing and polish.

Let's find out how the release is shaping up.

Performance

One of the things demanded by head honcho was that boot times should be improved. This certainly seems to have happened, and in my tests 9.04 booted pretty quickly. In fact, booting to the login prompt was actually quicker than resuming the machine from hibernation. (My test machine was a crappy budget laptop with a Celeron chip and 1.5GB of memory; I did a full hard disk install.)

Additionally, the driver is now included, although isn't used by default, and must be deliberately selected by the user during partitioning. The big boasts of ext4 as far as end-users are concerned include support for insanely large file systems of up to one , but the feature that's got most people excited is a performance boost compared to the older ext3. I ran some quick and unscientific tests on an ext3 installation of Ubuntu, and then repeated the tests of an ext4 install. The testbed was the aforementioned budget laptop, and the highly-accurate timing device was myself, my thumb, and the stopwatch mode of my wristwatch. In other words, don't hold too much store by these results.