Disabling vbox services to decrease boot time

I did a systemd-analyze critical-chain at boot on my system, vanilla Arch running on i3wm.

Now, I also have Virtualbox installed on my system. Therefore, the output from systemd-analyze critical-chain looks like this:

graphical.target @45.620s
└─multi-user.target @45.620s
  └─vboxweb-service.service @45.609s +10ms
    └─vboxdrv.service @1.645s +43.956s
      └─basic.target @1.637s
        └─sockets.target @1.637s
          └─dbus.socket @1.637s
            └─sysinit.target @1.637s
              └─sys-fs-fuse-connections.mount @6.422s +3ms
                └─systemd-modules-load.service @348ms +36ms
                  └─systemd-journald.socket @340ms
                    └─system.slice @327ms
                      └─-.slice @327ms

Note that `vboxdrv.service’ takes the longest time, around 43 seconds, which is almost 90% of the total boot time.

My question is: Is it safe to disable both of these services with: systemd disable vboxdrv.service? Then, say whenever I want to run virtualbox, I can just do: systemd start vboxdrv.service?

Answer

There’s no need to.

vboxdrv.service recompiles kernel drivers only when you update your kernel which I’m pretty sure you don’t do daily. Still you can disable it.