Comment by blibble 18 hours ago
I don't think it is a bad analogy
given how complicated the boot process is ([1]), and it occurs once a month, I'd rather it was as deterministic as possible
vs. shaving 1% off the boot time
[1]: distros continue to ship subtlety broken unit files, because the model is too complicated
Old machines probably didn't, no, but I have absolutely seen machines (Enterprise™ Servers) that took longer than that to get to the bootloader. IIRC it was mostly a combination of hardware RAID controllers and RAM... something. Testing?
Look at enterprise servers.
Competing POST in under 2 minutes is not guaranteed.
Especially the 4 socket beasts with lots of DIMMs.
See: the comment above and its folkloric concept of systemd as some kind of constraint solver
Unfortunately no one has actually bothered to write down how systemd really works; the closest to a real writeup out there is https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/
Most systems do not have 5 minute POST times. That’s an extreme outlier.
Linux runs all over, including embedded systems where boot time is important.
Optimizing for edge cases on outliers isn’t a priority. If you need specific boot ordering, configure it that way. It doesn’t make sense for the entire Linux world to sacrifice boot speed.