Comment 8 for bug 384579

I don't know the internals of the initramfs in Ubuntu but an exact problem is caused by the findfs applet from busybox which calls open() on /dev/fd0 causing high delays.

I reported the bug to the upstream,
https://bugs.busybox.net/show_bug.cgi?id=365

I've workarounded the problem by adding a --no-floppy parameter to the findfs applet and calling it with that parameter from initramfs:
http://svn.pardus.org.tr/pardus/2009/devel/system/base/mkinitramfs/files/disable-floppy-probing.patch

If the findfs/busybox combination is not valid for Ubuntu, just ignore this.