> My linux box takes about 4 seconds until graphical.target, most of which is connecting to wifi and ntpd, both of which are optional in principle.
But why should a login screen wait behind networking target for example? That ordering is up to the distributions.
> If you really want a fast boot, ditch all the bootloader compatibility layers, abstractions and dynamic configuration possibilities like initramfs. But then you would be at the mercy of the hardware vendor, which is definitely not worth it.
You'd expect that would be the case with SBCs, most if not all do overlays instead of ACPI. Very few also offer UEFI, so there isn't a slow(er) layer there either, but you are at the mercy of the vendor.
Login screen doesn't wait for graphical.target, its the other way around - display manager must be started for graphical.target to be complete. So in my case, ly-dm started 3 seconds into boot and it doesn't depend on anything significant. Either way, the broader point is that even if distros somehow managed to cut the time in half, thats still just 2 seconds compared to the massive time needed for firmware.
The only thing that pops out is systemd-binfmt.service somehow taking almost 1 second, which is strange since AFAIK it just echoes some strings into /proc file. There is still some room for optimization by mounting external drives asynchronously but that's not a safe optimization to make for general use.
But why should a login screen wait behind networking target for example? That ordering is up to the distributions.
> If you really want a fast boot, ditch all the bootloader compatibility layers, abstractions and dynamic configuration possibilities like initramfs. But then you would be at the mercy of the hardware vendor, which is definitely not worth it.
You'd expect that would be the case with SBCs, most if not all do overlays instead of ACPI. Very few also offer UEFI, so there isn't a slow(er) layer there either, but you are at the mercy of the vendor.