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Kernel boot is plenty fast with real hardware, usually under 1 seconds.

It's everything else that's slow. For example, this is my machine

Startup finished in 14.552s (firmware) + 2.885s (loader) + 741ms (kernel) + 23.116s (initrd) + 11.191s (userspace) = 52.488s

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The loader+initrd+userspace time there sounds unreasonable.

I've had libvirt bog standard qemu-kvm (not a microvm) creating a new Ubuntu VM from a disk image & booting to a login prompt in under 10 seconds for more than a decade. This is without fiddling with virtio, doing hardware scans for PCI, VGA, SATA and such, and booting via Grub (your "loader"). Those should be pretty comparable!

Ah, yes, you can ignore the loader + initrd. I'm multi-boot so the loader has 2 seconds timeout, and initrd is waiting for me to input my LUKS password.

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