Absolutely, there's a point of size and complexity where trying to bundle everything into an initramfs image is counter-productive. One example of loading the

Absolutely, there's a point of size and complexity where trying to bundle everything into an initramfs image is counter-productive. One example of loading the kernel and initramfs slowly is netbooting over TFTP. You're better off with a smaller kernel that can load the rest of the rootfs over a faster protocol, i.e. NFS, NBD, iSCSI, etc. Alternatively, you can load a bootloader that supports a faster protocol, such as GRUB, which can load the kernel binary over HTTP.