If there are several startup bundles list files specified through the mbs.boot.bootfile system property, in the default case the Boot module will process each of these files separately. Sometimes, there might be boot up bundles which introduce cross startup bundles list files dependencies. In those cases processing each file separately will lead to startup faults due to unresolved dependencies. To avoid this, you can set the mbs.boot.merge system property to "true" which will lead to merging all startup bundles list files into one and then processing the resulting installation instructions.