So one more update: My boot issue went away after updating: - kernel-firmware to 20180525 (as there were some amdgpu firmware updates in 20180518). - libLLVM6 from 6.0.0rc1 to 6.0.0 (and I strongly suspect this was the cause as I had VM pagefault issues before with libLLVM5 - but only in some OpenGL applications, not at boot).