Check which linux-firmware-* packages you have installed. Arch recently split the linux firmware into a bunch of separate packages, and made the old package depend on pretty much all of them. So unless you already knew about this and uninstalled the packages you don't need, you likely have a bunch of unnecessary firmware stuffed into your fallback initramfs.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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I thought I removed linux-firmware-nvidia but I guess not.
sudo pacman -R linux-firmware
sudo pacman -Rns linux-firmware-nvidia
This did the trick, thank you! Cut my fallback.img sizes almost in half!
That’s mine.
Stock kernel (only custom loader entries), using systemd-boot. No LTS kernel installed. I assume for LTS this will more or less double.
I had the same issue, breaking the update, and the solution was something along the lines of:
- Edit
/etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf - Change
MODULES=mosttoMODULES=dep - Update initramfs:
sudo update-initramfs -u
Although I think the cleanest way is to do it with an override config file in initramfs.conf.d, but do a bit of research on this.
I guess that by not including all modules, there is a risk the program forgets one of the modules you needed, but so far it works for me, and images are now a lot lighter.
hello, do you mean editing the MODULES in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf? since afaik and after searching in the arch wiki and in the arch packages, I couldn't find mention of update-initramfs or /etc/initramfs-tools.
This wiki page edits /etc/mkinitcpio.conf.
Probably, I was going by memory and these filenames are tricky 😅
Also, you can try switching to xz compression, it will reduce the image sizes by a decent amount
I'm glad you noticed.
I think the initramfs has gotten a lot bigger over the last couple of years. More modules included, more functionality.