Hi, thanks, Andrew and Charles for the replies. I finally managed to (sort of) fix the issue with the delayed boot.
First, for the record, in case someone comes here via the archives: the ".enuineIntel.align.0123456789abc" file in the initrd appears to be quite normal (strange as it sounds - at least to me), as well as the many lines in the initramfs.debug file looking like + read -r MNT_FSNAME MNT_DIR MNT_TYPE MNT_OPTS MNT_FREQ MNT_PASS MNT_JUNK + continue followed by a return value of 1. I checked with an ancient Dell Latitude X1 laptop with bullseye 32-bit installed I have here (I don't know why it never occured to me to look there before starting to asking dumb questions on the list). On Tue, 22 Feb 2022 09:45:34 +0000 "Andrew M.A. Cater" <amaca...@einval.com> wrote: (...) > I have one of these: I found that the multi-arch .iso worked better. > The UEFI in these is 32 bti, the processor is 64 bit - that might > have something to do with it, particularly if there's some alignment > issue. > > Mine doesn't stop for many seconds - but that's only one datum point. You are right, of course! Out of my usual stupdity I spent a few hours with fruitless attempts before the simplest solution came to my mind. In fact all I had to do was to turn my 32-bit installation into multiarch with # sudo dpkg --add-architecture amd64 followed by # apt-get update # apt-get install linux-image-amd64 which here replaced the 32-bit apparmor with its amd64-counterpart and installed a number of 64-bit libraries along with the amd64 kernel. Then reboot into the amd64 kernel, and voilĂ ! Loading the initrd now for unknown reasons is still a bit slow (9-10 sec. compared to 2-3 sec. with the otherwise considerably slower Latitude X1), but this certainly doesn't bother me enough to go into "debug mode" again :-) (...) > I used the unofficial .iso including non-free firmware. Oh yes, I forgot to mention. Of course I used that one, too. I don't think I'd get far with this laptop without the non-free firmware... Thanks again, and have a nice day, Michael .-.. .. ...- . .-.. --- -. --. .- -. -.. .--. .-. --- ... .--. . .-. No one wants war. -- Kirk, "Errand of Mercy", stardate 3201.7 (when reading the news these days, unfortunately one might feel tempted to contradict the Captain's statement)