Thanks for reporting, I think it belongs in diskimage-builder, where we already remove quite a few things: https://github.com/openstack/diskimage-builder/blob/master/elements/ironic-agent/finalise.d/99-remove-extra-packages

I'm not sure I am the best person to look at this.  I don't have the expertise in IPA to say for sure what is and isn't needed ("probably" and "not sure" is not strong enough for me to start removing random packages from a ramdisk that can be used in a huge number of varying environments).

Honestly, I don't know that looking at a list of files and packages is the right approach to cleaning up the memory usage anyway.  The RAM usage isn't due to the number of files in the image - it's only ~300 MB total right now.  If we want to reduce the RAM usage (and is that really worth our while?  Who's using Ironic to deploy to 2 GB machines these days?) it would be better to look at what is actually using RAM on the booted image and see if any of that can be removed.  If network manager is a culprit and someone can tell me definitely that we don't need it then we can certainly remove it.  If either of those things are not true then I'd be opposed to removing it.

> I'm not sure I am the best person to look at this

You get automatically assigned to all bugs with diskimage-builder component :) I didn't mean to assign you specifically.

> The RAM usage isn't due to the number of files in the image - it's only ~300 MB total right now.

Not sure about RAM usage, but reducing the size of the ramdisk might mitigate some networking issues with iPXE and especially PXE. Upstream we have a TinyCoreLinux-based ramdisk with size around 80 MiB and memory footprint around 384 MiB.

Moving this to a RFE, it not a bug directly affecting deployments.