Introduction to boot targets

The concept of boot targets is a whole new ball game. Boot targets are used when working with systemd. We can see increased performance, because only requests for a particular socket are started as needed. Also, systemd emulates init for compatibility, while in the background systemd is doing the work. When we use boot targets, we work with units. For a given boot target, a number of daemons reside. Let's see the available boot targets in an Ubuntu distribution:

root@ubuntu:/home/philip# systemctl list-units --type target
 UNIT           LOAD    ACTIVE   SUB  DESCRIPTION
 basic.target      loaded active active Basic System
 cryptsetup.target loaded active active Encrypted Volumes
 getty.target      loaded active active Login Prompts
 graphical.target  loaded active active Graphical Interface
 local-fs-pre.target loaded active active Local File Systems...