On Thursday, 25 July 2024 11:20:22 CEST Steven Price wrote:
[1] Although from my understanding it's firmware which is the real cause of bloat in initramfs size. I guess I need to start paying attention to this for panthor which adds GPU firmware - although currently tiny in comparison to others.
Can confirm that's the case. When using (f.e.?) plymouth, the gpu drivers and corresponding firmware gets added to initramfs. If you then have much more and much larger firmware files (nvidia f.e. added 2 fw files of 23 and 38 MB respectively ...) then you get a corresponding much larger initramfs. If you add a (fixed) bug in initramfs-tools where symlinks to directories weren't preserved, but full copies were made, you could end up with a single initramfs of 240MB ...