On current 22.04 and kinetic cloud images my default initramfs is 102 (!) MB, and takes almost 20s to unpack from grub -- i.e. the time between booting the grub menu entry and seeing the first kernel message. Admittedly this is with the full linux-image-generic kernel (as I need scsi_debug).
MODULES=dep reduces it to some 50 MB, and removing /lib/firmware/amdgpu to 33 MB, which then unpacks in less than 3 seconds.
On current 22.04 and kinetic cloud images my default initramfs is 102 (!) MB, and takes almost 20s to unpack from grub -- i.e. the time between booting the grub menu entry and seeing the first kernel message. Admittedly this is with the full linux-image-generic kernel (as I need scsi_debug).
MODULES=dep reduces it to some 50 MB, and removing /lib/firmware/ amdgpu to 33 MB, which then unpacks in less than 3 seconds.