Reboot recovery time of a DU node with the RT kernel is much longer than without RT kernel. The root cause is BZ 1975356. The DU node profile needs to enable the fix by adding rcupdate.rcu_normal_after_boot=0 to the kernel commandline.
Soft reboot test on 4.9 load with the additional kernel arg took about 14 minutes with 43 test pods. If this kernel arg was not added, it could take more than half an hour to recovery.