Systemd correctly implements the "noauto" and "nofail" keywords in fstab(5) that were added in 2008 in the way they have been documented since 2010: if neither

Systemd correctly implements the "noauto" and "nofail" keywords in fstab(5) that were added in 2008 in the way they have been documented since 2010: if neither of these is specified for a filesystem, then that file system will be mounted at boot time and a failed attempt to mount that filesystem implies a boot failure. Util-linux-ng 2.14 Release Notes (09-Jun-2008) ============================================== mount(8) supports new "nofail" mount option. https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/commit/abe3d704b6aeb6b82ff32e8599edb56525cdfd72 https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/commit/abe3d704b6aeb6... The fact that previous init scripts gladly ignored these failures does not reflect negatively on systemd but on those init scripts. Since 2011, FreeBSD has the same options with the same behavior, except that "nofail" is called "failok". https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=222832 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=22283... Add a special mount option "failok" to indicate that the administrator wants the system to proceed to boot without bailing out into single user mode, even when the file system can not be successfully mounted. By your argument, FreeBSD broke UNIX.