[stavros]

Until someone more experienced than me comments: The userland is the collection of programs and functionality that run outside of the kernel. AFAIK you need some things (but I'm not sure which) apart from the kernel if you want to run your executables, and it looks like Gokrazy provides those.

[throwaway894345]

To clarify a bit, you don’t need additional things to run your executables per se (for example, pure Go binaries can run directly on the Linux kernel) but there are a lot of utilities that you will probably want—things like a process manager, SSH daemon, a shell, etc. These are all userland components.

[speed_spread]

To expand on this, it means that once the kernel is done booting, the first (and only) program it will start is the bundled go-written application. This differs from the usual chaining to the "init" (like systemd) process, which would then spawn a myriad of other programs.