The 2b rpm-size manifest revealed the biggest packages aren't the kiosk but
base bloat: linux-firmware 678 MB and glibc-all-langpacks 228 MB (vs chromium
370 + llvm 129). The uncompressed erofs is read over NVMe/TCP on every boot,
so this is fleet-wide dead weight + attack surface.
glibc: swap glibc-all-langpacks (every language) for glibc-minimal-langpack +
glibc-langpack-en. ~220 MB; image is English-only.
linux-firmware: a live fleet audit (modinfo -F firmware over loaded modules +
sysfs/lspci driver bindings on the real 820-class hosts and the VMs) proved the
only firmware any host loads is Intel i915 (GPU). Every NIC is firmware-free
(e1000e reports on-chip NVM, not a fw file; virtio_net loads nothing), so the
catastrophic missing-NIC-firmware case is off the table. Keep i915 + intel/
(ice DDP insurance) + mellanox + intel-ucode; strip the ~600 MB of foreign
vendor blobs (amdgpu/nvidia/radeon/ath/qcom/...). Remove iwl*-firmware (Wi-Fi,
~83 MB) on a wired-only fleet. Strip-in-place since the package can't be
removed without losing i915; du reports the result in the build log.
BENCH-VERIFY: kiosk still renders on the 820 (i915 DMC/GuC load) — the one real
risk; widen the keep-list if any host has a non-Intel GPU or an ice/mlx5 NIC.
Audiobuzz
9464e7fc2a