Ok, it is younger than I thought, it was added in 2008 so more conservative veteran UNIX admins might not have heard of it: Util-linux-ng 2.14 Release Notes

Ok, it is younger than I thought, it was added in 2008 so more conservative veteran UNIX admins might not have heard of it: Util-linux-ng 2.14 Release Notes (09-Jun-2008) ============================================== Release highlights ------------------ mount(8) supports new "nofail" mount option. Then it wasn't documented for 2 years, the commit that adds it to the fstab.5 man page is from 2010: https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/commit/abe3d704b6aeb6b82ff32e8599edb56525cdfd72 https://github.com/karelzak/util-linux/commit/abe3d704b6aeb6... Interestingly, it pre-dates the similar FreeBSD parameter by 3 years: 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. Oh and people are of course invited to down-vote me again, I've got karma to burn, and the evidence that systemd is doing things in exactly the same way as FreeBSD clearly needs to be suppressed if we want to maintain our regular rituals of pointless outrage on this site.