Userspace boot speed: less than a second

I did not care about boot speed for a long time, since servers usually restarted only for kernel upgrades, laptops suspend to ram all the time, and I have no desktop machine at home for years now. Though one use case started to motivate me recently: I use virtual machines a lot, and waiting for them to boot up is boring.

So I looked at the systemd-analyze blame output, and it turned out that for a base-only install the only service that takes a lot of time is netconfig. It’s because it was a oneshot service, so the whole boot process waited for dhcpcd to get an IP. A much better solution is to just start netconfig in the background and move on — and that’s exactly frugalwareutils in git does now.

Before:

After: