As of 2024-07-10 registry.redhat.io/rhel9/rhel-bootc has linux-firmware installed which weighs 400 MBs and is needed only on physical hosts and on VMs using device pass-through.

Since linux-firmware is not a mandatory package and it's rarely needed it would seem tempting to either remove it by default or offer a container variant without it, otherwise unnecessary resources everywhere are spent transferring, storing and processing the extra space it consumes.

linux-firmware size is ~400M. rhel-bootc size with it is ~1.25GB and without it ~850MB.

Thanks.