I've tested both EFI and BIOS boots on EC2, and they have about the same overhead. And I've tested AMIs that are no bigger than a Linux kernel and a single sta

I've tested both EFI and BIOS boots on EC2, and they have about the same overhead. And I've tested AMIs that are no bigger than a Linux kernel and a single static binary; times are still on par with what's listed here. Still takes 7-8 seconds before the first user-controlled instruction gets to run.