Actually this 2 minutes bothers me this much that I'm emailing Arch General Mailing List is because I'm afraid my Arch would be broken if my laptop shuts down in this process and I have to rescue it by live USB. For nearly a decade of using this particular Arch installation alone, I never had a single case of losing power while mkinitcpio was running. I wouldn’t be afraid of that scenario. And laptops are better than my PC in that manner, because you have backup power from the battery.
Does it help if it gets executed over multi threads or the bottleneck is somewhere else? For my particular setup, running `mkinitcpio -P` yields those times:
real 1m8.320s user 0m24.742s sys 0m12.806s ------------------------ Half of the time mkinitcpio was waiting for disk I/O. Most likely `find`, but that’s only mu guess. This is only a single computer. Unlike modern laptops it uses spinning rust for storage, but OTOH it is also running a CPU that remembers 2000s and DDR2-800 RAM. So both would affect the outcome.