Indeed. In apps lazy loading is something you add when you need it. But for kernels, it’s the first problem you tackle: how to pick yourself up with your bootstraps. Booting is tricky now, and it always has been. Right back to the early machines that were booted by manually entering machine code via switches.

Interestingly AWS virtual machines still boot in 16-bit mode, then bootstrap up through 32 and then 64 bit modes, last I heard.