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

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