Comment 4 for bug 2065180

Some results from some local testing. These tests were all performed on the same SD card (a Samsung EVO Select 64GB) with fresh installs of the jammy and noble server images, after running full upgrades and rebooting:

Pi 5, noble -- 01:23
Pi 4B, noble -- 03:05
Pi 3B+, noble -- 05:19

Pi 5, jammy -- unsupported
Pi 4B, jammy -- 01:06
Pi 3B+, jammy -- 01:59

So, there *appears* to be a substantial slow down from jammy. However, I don't think this is due to dracut or a performance regression in initramfs-tools. I remembered that, this cycle, the kernel team got rid of the linux-modules-extra split in the linux-raspi kernel. This results in a substantially increased initrd size because many more modules are included by default.

I took a listing of the jammy and noble initramfs contents and (after some manipulation to remove .zst suffixes, which are also new in the noble initramfs, and removing kernel version numbers). I'll attach the result of diff'ing these outputs, but a quick grep through the results and some calculations shows roughly 1000 extra files in the noble version.

In other words, this is not comparing like for like.