alpine linux netboot 3.20.2 extremely slow...

[pracplayopen]

EXPECTED

upgraded ipxe to boot alpine 3.20.2
it should boot about the same time as previous alpine releases (eg 3.16)

ACTUAL

on same hardware, alpine w/3.20.2 now takes ~10-12 minutes to boot?

whereas on 3.16 the same hardware boots in ~60seconds.

no errors are seen during the boot process, it just hangs for that long and then just works.
this happens every time, but otherwise the system works fine.
i don't see any errors during boot, it just sits at the blinking cursor section ( '_') for a much, much longer time than normal.

falling back to 3.16 and it again boots extremely quickly again.

don't see any errors in dmesg either, wondering if anybody else has experienced this or can see something missed?
what might be the likely culprit or a place to look?

NOTE: the dmesg output below includes a netboot w/docker overlay and some other pkgs, but the same thing happens if you boot with the headless-ssh pkg overlay and no other pkgs.

SYSTEM INFO

# uname -a
Linux erdos 6.6.41-0-lts #1-Alpine SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC 2024-07-18 20:00:18 x86_64 Linux

# cat /etc/os-release 
NAME="Alpine Linux"
ID=alpine
VERSION_ID=3.20.2
PRETTY_NAME="Alpine Linux v3.20"

DMESG

very-slow-bootup-after-upgrading-alpine-linux-netboot-3.20.2.txt