"Loading initial ramdisk" is slow at boot

I found out that the slow boot comes from a large initrd. I also found out that at that point the system is relying on a slow but reliable access method from the BIOS to load the kernel. That all makes sense now. To fix the problem you can edit /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf and set "MODULES=dep". Then run "sudo update-initramfs -u". This reduced initrd from 245 MB to 5.4M. I'm not sure why it is larger or some systems. Maybe it is usually this large these days and some systems have a much slower BIOS disk access routine. Now this phase of boot takes less than 2 seconds.