performance – Boot very fast in a VirtualBox VM and on an i7 Intel desktop, but very slow and hanging on an Intel N150 NUC

I have created a GPT disk image with 1) an UEFI partition and 2) an Ubuntu root partition.

The root partition was created from files extracted from the official Ubuntu files in ubuntu-24.04-minimal-cloudimg-amd64-root.tar.xz.

The disk boots perfectly on a VirtualBox VM and on my good old i7 Intel desktop computer, but when I deploy it on a Mini NUC N150 computer, the boot starts normally, then every step in the boot process becomes very slow, and after more than 30 minutes the boot process hangs, after the journal service has been started.

In the context of a chroot on the disk image I created (i.e. executing the commands on the “offline” Ubuntu system), I installed these additional packages with apt: linux-firmware, intel-microcode, amd64-microcode, linux-generic-hwe-24.04. I also did “add-apt-repository restricted” and “ubuntu-drivers autoinstall” to get proprietary drivers.

I doubled-checked, and the /boot folder of the root Ubuntu partition contains the Linux kernel 6.14.0, which is supposed to support the N150.

Any idea why the boot process is that slow, and what can cause it to hang?