There's been some nice work done lately on boot time in Mandriva: hotplug has been mostly eradicated in favour of udev, which has made significant inroads on the fairly slobby boot of 2005 LE. Current Cooker boots - including loading X, but not GNOME - in 44 seconds on my system, which is a 30 second improvement over 2005 - not bad. The process is really pretty efficient now. Here's the graph from the excellent bootchart utility, which was produced as part of Fedora's own boot time reduction drive.