Two thoughts: When trimming, ls -lSr in the kernel build directory will identify large objects. We have had kernel modules for a while, but I'm not entirely clear on where we are. I would think that moving to a mode of aggressively not including things that can be modules and loading them from the fs as needed would help, particularly if the issue is the bootloader, vs memory used up when running. This is not build as part of an -8 release build, but there is MODULAR in the conf directory.
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