[Bug 1931024] Re: BOOT fails on UEFI with 100MB initrd.img [Dell XPS 9550]

[Mauricio Salazar]

** Also affects: initramfs-tools
   Importance: Undecided
       Status: New

** No longer affects: initramfs-tools

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1931024

Title:
  BOOT fails on UEFI with 100MB initrd.img [Dell XPS 9550]

Status in initramfs-tools package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  I've been working with a user for the last 2 days on a failure to even
  start the kernel when installing 20.04 or 21.04 (possibly other
  releases) with a UEFI boot.

  System is Dell XPS 9550 amd64 with Ubuntu Budgie.

  The symptom is that after GRUB successfully loads the kernel into RAM,
  it fails to return from loading the initrd into RAM. This was proved
  by adding guard 'echo' and 'sleep' around each stage n grub.cfg.

  After much investigation since this seemed initially related to a LUKS
  install I noticed the initrd.img files generated with MODULES=most are
  105MB. Most of that is unneeded firmware and other files so I changed
  to MODULES=dep. Resulting initrd.img's are around 55MB.

  System then boots correctly.

  This looks like a possible issue with the UEFI on these XPS models but
  as initrd.img sizes get ridiculously large this is likely to hit more
  systems and users.

  For several years I carry optimisation patches to initramfs-tools that
  don't add most firmwares except those specifically required (certainly
  not adding AMD GPU firmware when system has only Intel or Nvidia GPUs
  - and visa versa)

  My initrd.img's are a hybrid of MODULES=dep and result in less than
  20MB.

  My recommendation is to add optimisations to initramfs-tools or adopt
  MODULES=dep.

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