This is a great example of an edge case which many people might never need but is really useful in a pinch: that’s what provides the equivalent of the Mac target disk mode, which is really handy if you need to repair a no longer-bootable system.
Where would you put it instead of something started by pid 1? It needs to boot the kernel and unlike macOS they have to run on a ton of different architectures so they can’t count on the firmware.
Have you ever setup an iscsi shared device in linux? It’s quite complex and a bit messy.
If systemd can make something similar (i still get a block device from another host in the network) in a simpler manner that would be just awesome, truly a huge win for everybody.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/1761066b135f1a322c...