Bug 1386202

Summary:	kernel should not require linux-firmware
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7	Reporter:	Marko Myllynen <myllynen>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Neil Horman <nhorman>
kernel sub component:	Other	QA Contact:	Red Hat Kernel QE team <kernel-qe>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	Docs Contact:
Severity:	unspecified
Priority:	unspecified	CC:	nhorman, rjones
Version:	7.3
Target Milestone:	rc
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	Unspecified
OS:	Unspecified
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Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	If docs needed, set a value
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Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2016-10-25 13:45:35 UTC	Type:	Bug
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:

Description Marko Myllynen 2016-10-18 12:01:28 UTC

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

Comment 2 Neil Horman 2016-10-25 13:45:35 UTC

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

Comment 3 Richard W.M. Jones 2016-10-25 14:03:01 UTC

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.