Onyx boots in an average of 10 seconds (It's true, I was there.)

Onyx is able to boot so fast for two reasons:

1. Onyx has a very thin, very lightweight kernel and uses a custom-built ramdisk.
2. Onyx uses runit instead of sysvinit, which loads services in parallel.

Even on the slowest system tested (Pentium 3 733Mhz, 64MiB of memory) Onyx was able to boot in 11.75 seconds.