> Use unmkinitramfs. It appears you've only looked at the first archive,
> the early one, which gets the kernel into shape. The second, main one
> is the big one.
OK, for those interested I tracked it down: indeed the machine with the
larger initrd had MODULES=most instead of MODULES=dep.
It took me some effort to figure out that it was actually
LZMA-compressed as I had specified (the first CPIO archive, containing
the intel microcode blob isn't, but the second is): `unmkinitramfs`
splits the initrd into separate CPIO archives but doesn't let you see
them, so I could easily see the content of the archives but they were
silently decompressed so you can't immediately see what compression (if
any) is used. I had to tweak the code to preserve the intermediate temp
files in order to get to the bottom of it.
In any case, thanks all for the help,
Stefan
