Yeah, and Ahmdal's law comes directly into play here. At 7% of the total boot time, this bubble sort may be the slowest part of the kernel boot. But, even if you optimized away the sort entirely somehow, you could still only save 1.97 ms. And once you do that, the next slowest thing probably doesn't take more than ~1ms to run. Eventually, you get to a state that resists these kinds of targeted optimizations, where there are no bottlenecks, and the only improvements can come from new algorithms and data structures, i.e. "uniformly slow code."
Of course, calling anything that takes place in less than a blink of an eye "slow" is overstating things... lol :-)
If only I could get my desktop environment to come up in less than 28ms :-)