On Thursday, December 8, 2022, Chris Adams <linux@cmadams.net> wrote:
Once upon a time, Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> said:
> On Thu, Dec 08, 2022 at 07:59:20PM +0100, drago01 wrote:
> > That would be very crazy, as you will have a degraded user experience
> > (laggy UI, wrong resolution, ...) to save a couple of megabytes that are a
> > non issue for today's hardware.
>
> Please bear in mind the difference between bare metal and virtual
> machines. The bare metal machine may have 32 GB of RAM, making a
> 800 MB install image a non-issue. For a public cloud virtual machine
> though, this could bump your VM sizing up 1 level from 2 GB quota
> to a 4 GB RAM quota, with correspondingly higher price point.

Also "today's hardware" increasingly includes small devices like
Raspberry Pi.  ARM devices don't typically use anaconda, but there are
also small x86 based devices competing with the small ARM devices.

I think the answer is "no", but I'll ask anyway: is there a way to evict
all the firmware once the system is started?  I'm guessing that as long
as it's all in one disk image, that's not possible.  Can we tack on a
second disk image with use-once (at most) stuff and then drop the whole
image after startup? 

Again there is no reason why everything on the disk image had to be loaded into memory in the first place. Same way when you boot your installed system, not everything on disk is loaded into memory. If you don't need the firmware, it should stay on the install media and never be loaded into memory.