[CentOS-devel] Centos 7 vagrant image unnecessary packages

Hello everyone,

sorry for being so slow to answer: I moved closer to work mid-November, 
but I have no Internet access yet (that'll come sometime in January, 
hopefully). I'm afraid that changes to the Vagrant boxes will have to 
wait until then, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Regarding packages that could be removed, I already experimented with 
removing linux-firmware (which is indeed not needed by VMs), but 
Anaconda will always install it, since the kernel package depends on it; 
kernel upgrades will also install linux-firmware, if missing. It is 
possible to remove it in %post, just like Fedora does, but without being 
to able to run something like zerofree (centos/7 uses XFS, not Ext4), 
the size of the image remains the same - that's why I didn't push the 
changes to the official repo. I'll look into removing centos-logos as 
soon as I can, thanks for the suggestion.

We could make our images smaller by splitting the kernel package into a 
minimal kernel package that only contains the drivers needed by a VM, 
and a kernel-modules-extra with all drivers needed when running on real 
hardware (that's what Fedora did some time ago, and partially why their 
images are smaller). We can only hope that Red Hat will also do this for 
RHEL in the future.

Best regards,
Laurențiu Păncescu

On 2017-12-11 17:55, aleksander.baranowski wrote:
> As mention in thread  "Broken man pages in vagrant box 1710.01". There
> are packages that removal might be consider. First one is centos-logos.
> centos-logos are required by plymouth, that add animation during boot.
> In my opinion it's not necessary for Vagrant image.
> 
> Second one is kernel-firmware. This package don't have any further
> dependencies in libvirt image. As said libvirt image is working (in my
> case ofc, note that I don't have fully functional test suit for Vagrant
> images) without it. Fedora cloud image from
> https://app.vagrantup.com/fedora/boxes/27-cloud-base also lives without
> this package (at least libvirt box).
> 
> I want to notice that I'm unable to provide any additional information
> on different vagrant providers, so any critics are kindly welcome.
> 
> Bests,
> Alex