What matters? Experimenting with Ubuntu Desktop VM boot time

It seemed slow to me that the "minimal" installation of Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 in a VirtualBox VM takes 37 seconds to boot up, so I ran some experiments.

The host system is a Late 2012 iMac running macOS Catalina.  It has 24 GB of RAM (2x4 GB + 2x8 GB) installed, and the CPU is the Intel Core i5-3470 (Ivy Bridge, 4 cores, 4 threads, 3.2 GHz base and 3.6 GHz max turbo.)  In all cases, the guests are running with VirtualBox Ubuntu Linux 64-bit defaults, which is to say, one ACHI SATA drive that is dynamically sized.  The backing store is on an APFS-formatted Fusion Drive.

The basic "37 seconds" number was timed with a stopwatch, from the point where the Oracle VM screen is replaced with black, to the point where the wallpaper is displayed.  Auto-login is enabled for consistency in this test.  This number should be considered ±1 second, since I took few samples of each system.  I'm looking for huge improvements.

So what are the results?

• Baseline: 1 core, ext4, linux-generic, elevator=mq-deadline.  37 seconds.
• XFS: 1 core, xfs root, linux-generic, elevator=mq-deadline.  37 seconds.
• linux-virtual: 1 core, xfs root, linux-virtual, elevator=mq-deadline. 37 seconds.
• No-op scheduler: 1 core, xfs root, linux-virtual, elevator=noop. 37 seconds.
• Quad core: 4 cores, xfs root, linux-virtual, elevator=noop. 27 seconds!

The GUI status icons showed mostly disk access, with some heavy CPU usage for the last part of the boot, but only adding CPU resources made an appreciable difference.  I also tried the linux-kvm kernel, but it doesn't display any graphics or even any text on the console, so that was a complete failure.

(I've tried optimizing boot times in the past with systemd-analyze critical-chain and systemd-analyze blame, but it mostly tells me what random thing was starved for resources that boot, instead of consistently pointing to one thing causing a lot of delay.  Also, it has a habit of saying "boot complete in seven seconds" or whatever as soon as it has decided to start GDM, leaving a lot of time unaccounted for.  So I didn't bother on these tests.)

Correction: it was Ubuntu 20.10, not 20.04 LTS.  The post has been updated accordingly.