[TkTech]

Is it? My laptop is only shutoff when switching from a dock at home to a dock at work, changing the GPU and hubs available. The OS I just netbooted off my NAS has no idea what it's booting on. I can plug and unplug USB devices anytime, including while the system is off. Maybe I swapped USB headsets, maybe I plugged in a fingerprint or smartcard reader, which needs to be initialized before the login manager starts. Maybe my time server is no longer reachable, so NTP needs to find a new one from the pool, because if it doesn't sync timing correctly the certificate for LDAP won't validate and my work laptop won't be able to login. Maybe it needs to initialize the networking stack to handle an NFS or Samba mount in my /etc/fstab which has a nowait=0, since I use it as a boot volume.

This could be a very, very long list of hypothetical changes :)

[xp84]

All that USB stuff ought not to be blocking though, right? since those can also be connected or removed at any time.

[bmicraft]

pxe boot obviously has some constraints that don't usually apply otherwise.

Presumably the dock can be detached while booted, so the kernel should also be able to handle booting and only detect at some point that the dock has disappeared