debian-12 with in-VM kernel needs 80MB more memory than debian-11

[3hhh]

How to file a helpful issue

Qubes OS release

4.1, probably 4.2 too

Brief summary

debian-12 with in-VM kernel needs 80MB more memory than debian-11

Steps to reproduce

1. Apply salt states to have identical software stacks on debian-12 and debian-11.
2. Attempt to run both with the same memory constraints (in my case 400 MB fixed memory).

Expected behavior

Boot.

Actual behavior

debian-11 boots. debian-12 will start to boot with 480 MB memory.

Since I run ~20 VMs in average, that means 1,6GB higher memory requirements, which I don't like.

Related

#8505

Likely root cause

I checked all running services and couldn't find any difference.
However the debian-12 compressed initrd is 70 MB in size, whereas the debian-11 initrd is ~40MB in size. I guess that's the root cause.

[3hhh]

Changing /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf MODULES from most to dep followed by an update-initramfs -uk all reduces the initrd size to 20MB and debian-12 boots with 400MB. debian-11 works with most.

EDIT: Doing the same change on debian-11 reduces its initrd size to 12 MB. So there's still 8MB less than on debian-12.

[3hhh]

Ok. So this is a duplicate of #8277.

Apparently the fix wasn't ported to 4.1 debian-12.

[github-actions]

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