> I used the MODULES=dep setting and got a reduction from 70mb to 20mb > for each initramfs.
Wow, that's still about twice as large as what I get on my amd64/armhf/686 systems (I typically get about 40MB for MODULES=most and 10-12MB for MODULES=dep). The compression algorithm in use makes some difference, but definitely not a factor 2 unless maybe you're not using any compression at all? Stefan