Neither of the listed commits do anything that significantly affects the binary output of the image.
841ff8eb49 - this is simply a revamping of the configuration and Makefile. Though only impact this could have is that optional code could now be removed, in which case I'd expect it to fail completely or the optimisation settings are wrong. The later would potentially affect performance but the settings look write to me.
Just to be sure can you do the following:
make distclean
./configure # with whatever options you need
V=1 make
and pastebin the output.
711ce27baf - this is a minor correction to existing code added in previous commits and relates to stuff that should only really be accessed on startup. Unless the decrypt code is being very inefficient and loading config constantly this will have no effect.
Adam