[MisterTea]

I remember an article from over a decade ago about booting Linux on an embedded device in 1 second. The key was to modify driver init and bring up the critical stuff first such as disk and graphics and boot user space as fast as possible. Then worry about networking and so on.

[ndesaulniers]

I'd imagine that if init tried to use the network before the kernel's networking was initialized, you could deadlock though that'd be considered a bug in the init dependencies. The hard part is even visualizing the dependencies with init is tricky. I don't know if that's something systemd explicitly solves, but I try to stay out of userspace (unless the compiler is borked; narrator: it is)