Cross compiling a kernel takes minutes, deploying the thing on the target machine takes an hour. Most of the time is spent generating the initramfs. Both the build host and the target run Fedora which uses dracut to that end.
It’d be great to build the initramfs along with the kernel. Is that possible with dracut, and if so, how?
EDIT in 2023: Looks like Fedora’s UKI infrastructure will provide this kind of prebuilt, host-independent initramfs at some point in the future, probably even for ARM64 which is the platform on which this question arose in the first place.
/lib/modules/$(uname -r)
weighing 1.3 GB (the config should be as close to stock Fedora armv7hl). And it’s not parallel on a 1-core machine ;)