Yes, there was an effort to turn all the dependencies into on demand loads, where possible. It started in 2020 with libpcre2: https://github.com/systemd/systemd

Yes, there was an effort to turn all the dependencies into on demand loads, where possible. It started in 2020 with libpcre2: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/16260 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/16260 But many others followed, like libselinux: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/19997 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/19997 libqrencode: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/16145 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/16145 p11kit: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/25771 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/25771 tpm2-util: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/28333 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/28333 libiptc: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/29836 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/29836 libkmod: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31131 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31131 Exactly during the development of the libkmod PR, someone noted that libxz could be lazily loaded too: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31131#issuecomment-1963334057 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31131#issuecomment-1... And so I proposed myself to to the job, nothing less, nothing more. If you look at the code of the other PRs, you see that they are very very similar, there are also macros to easy this task, like DLSYM_FUNCTION()