Comment 20 for bug 1259861

After studying the code in net/ipv4/ipconfig.c I'm fairly confident
that the problem is caused by wait_for_devices() failing to find any
network interfaces and timing out. That function waits for 12 seconds
before giving up, and the time difference between the "IP-Config:
Entered" message and the end of the delay is just a hair over 12
seconds.

It makes sense that wait_for_devices() would fail: There are no
network devices until the initramfs loads the network interface
modules, and the initramfs init script doesn't start running until
after the kernel is done processing the ip=* argument.

So if the kernel fails to handle the ip=* argument, how does the ip=*
parameter work at all? The answer is the initramfs: The initramfs
init script parses the ip command-line argument and the
scripts/functions script runs the ipconfig utility with the
appropriate arguments to configure the interface.

I see a few ways to fix this:
  * Modify the kernel source code to provide a way to change/disable
    the timeout.
  * Modify the kernel source code to allow the initramfs to load while
    the kernel is still waiting for a network device to appear.
  * Compile all network drivers into the kernel itself (don't build
    them as modules).
  * Modify the initramfs init script to introduce an alias for the
    ip=* parameter, e.g., initramfs_ip=*. This would allow users to
    avoid the pointless kernel processing.

The last option is probably the easiest and least likely to introduce
any unintended side effects.