6

This package is half a gigabyte so I'd like to determine if it's truly needed.

I'm having trouble understanding why it would actually be required on a VPS, and no other packages depend on it, however, I'm still worried because if removing it somehow renders the server unbootable, it will be difficult to recover from.

How can I determine with certainty whether I actually require this or not?

# uname -a
Linux hostname.domain 5.11.0-27-generic #29~20.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Wed Aug 11 15:58:17 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
# lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
Release:        20.04
Codename:       focal
Displayname71
  • 321
  • Is that still relevant on a virtual machine though? I wouldn't think that any of the "real" hardware would be even be visible or touchable from my VPS, and any hardware security vulnerabilities would be the responsibility of the VPS provider, not me? – Displayname71 Aug 27 '21 at 23:44
  • Does this answer your question? Which packages cannot access physical hardware under virtualized environment? – guiverc Aug 28 '21 at 00:42
  • Not exactly but it did eventually head me to the cloud images at https://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/focal/current/ which I'm not using but looking at the manifest files give some insight on what packages are normally included for various virtualized platforms. It seems that linux-firmware is not included in any of them but I'm still not 100% confident. I'm considering renting a 2nd VPS instance to use as a test system, so I can test package removals and such on it before implementing on my main system. – Displayname71 Aug 28 '21 at 14:39
  • Having major disk space problems. What did your testing find? – rjt May 12 '22 at 15:13
  • I eventually removed it without any real prior testing, and I've observed zero issues. It's been a few months (and a couple reboots) so it my case it seems like it was safe. Your mileage may vary. – Displayname71 May 12 '22 at 18:23

1 Answers1

6

Followup much later...

I eventually purged all packages containing "firmware", "microcode", or "modules" in the name with no negative consequences and no known boot issues.

I've since repeated this on a number of other VPS's, XEN and KVM and others, with a number of different VPS / cloud providers, and have no encountered issues on any of them.

Displayname71
  • 321
  • Thank you for the info! I have just done the same on a VMWare install of Ubuntu 22.04 with a desktop, and it works just fine. Wow, wish I knew this years ago! apt upgrade down from 1350 MB downloaded to just 80 MB. – Violet Giraffe Dec 01 '23 at 17:13