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Description of problem:
The linux-firmware package is huge:

# echo n | yum -C remove linux-firmware | grep size
Installed size: 96 M

None of this is useful on VMs / cloud images and is one of the biggest packages pulled in for no reason when creating minimal (cloud) images.

(For some reason one can actually do "yum -C remove linux-firmware" without issues but the next time kernel is upgraded linux-firmware is pulled in again.)

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
RHEL 7.3 Beta / kernel-3.10.0-493.el7.x86_64

I'm going to close that as NOTABUG.  The statement "None of this is useful on
VMs" isn't correct. Its often not needed, but thats not guaranteed.  Some VF devices may well need firmware support, and I could easily
imagine that firmware would be needed for many usb devices that are assigned via
usb passthrough.


There is also the unified kernel issue to contend with.  That is to say, the
same kernel that runs on a VM runs on a physical system, and while firmware may
often not be needed on the former, it is almost always needed on the latter.

If a VM wants to save the 100M that firmware offers, a custom install would be in order in which the %post section of a kickstart script removed the exact firmware files that an administrator knows aren't needed for that installation

An alternative to consider is to reduce the strength of the
dependency from Requires -> Recommends.  This would allow
kickstarts to remove the linux-firmware package without
forcing RPM.

Note that weak dependencies are a RHEL 8 feature AIUI, so
it wouldn't change the resolution of this bug.