Time to move the GPU drivers out of the initrd and rely on EFI framebuffer in the initrd

Posted Oct 9, 2025 18:10 UTC (Thu) by shalem (subscriber, #4062)
Parent article: Last-minute /boot boost for Fedora 43

I believe that the time really has come to move the GPU drivers out of the initrd and rely on EFI framebuffer in the initrd.

There are some downsides to it, but I believe we have reached a point where the upsides easily outway the downsides, see my blog post from 2 years ago for a detailed listing of pros and cons: https://hansdegoede.dreamwidth.org/28291.html

Time to move the GPU drivers out of the initrd and rely on EFI framebuffer in the initrd

Posted Oct 17, 2025 18:04 UTC (Fri) by gpiccoli (subscriber, #109098) [Link]

Super +1 - I've done that in my Linux distro as well, reduced initramfs from ~100MB to like 15M!
Not to mention GRUB is a bit slower on reading the initrd file, so that speedup was also something I could notice clearly, when reducing the size of the file.

Thanks for the blog link, nice reading =)