[Ubuntu Server 25.10] Disabling Cloud-Init, Pollinate, LVM on a Raspberry Pi?

Hello,

I’ve installed Ubuntu Server 25.10 on a Raspberry Pi 5 2 GiB, so I’m trying to disable everything I can to free up memory and CPU.

There are a few items I’m not sure about, as this my first attempt at using Ubuntu Server in about 5 years.

  1. Cloud-Init: I’m running a single Pi that’s not a hypervisor. There are a whole host of cloud-init services. What are they doing there? I’m only familiar with cloud-init as something I use to provision VMs in Proxmox.
  2. Pollinate: This accesses the internet to generate enthopy. That makes sense for a virtual machine, but, again, I’m not sure how useful it is on a Pi 5, unless Pi 5s cannot do that t themselves.
  3. LVM: There are a few LVM2-related services running, but I’m booted off a single SATA SSD over USB, using basic ext4. I think these are safe to disable?

There’s a few other odd ones (like the iSCSI services) that I might use, but the ones above don’t even seem to apply to running on a Pi–it’s not like you get the option of setting up LVM when you flash the SD card/USB disk.

I realize that it’s possible that Ubuntu Server might depend on cloud-init somehow, but I also know there’s no harm in deactivating parts of the default install that make no sense being there. (I already removed snapd from the system completely, and everything is fine.)

Cloud init is used to provision the os when it is a vm. Can be disabled.

Raspberry has hardware rng so the pollinate service is not really necessary either.

Lvm services are useful only if you use lvm volumes. Can be disabled.

Cloud-init may also be used to call dhcp or initialise IP settings, so I would ensure you have a network manager or systemd-networkd setting set up before disabling it.

And, if you disable in systemctl, test around, and if all works, through reboots, starts/stops of the apps you want, you can mask the service to stop it coming back after an update.