It was reported and confirmed in LP bug #1875400
(https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-images/+bug/1875400) that on the public
KVM cloud image there exists a large list of packages marked for auto-removal.
This should never be the case on a released cloud image.
These packages are marked for auto-removal because in the KVM image binary hook
we removed both initramfs-tools and busybox-initramfs packages. Due to package
dependencies this also removed:
busybox-initramfs* cloud-initramfs-copymods* cloud-initramfs-dyn-netconf*
cryptsetup-initramfs* initramfs-tools* initramfs-tools-core* multipath-tools*
overlayroot* sg3-utils-udev* ubuntu-server*
But it did not remove all the packages that the above list depended on.
This resulted in all those packages being marked for auto-removal because they
were not manually installed nor did they have any manually installed packages
that depended on them.
The removal of initramfs-tools and busybox-initramfs was to avoid the
generation of initramfs in images that should boot initramfsless.
This requirement is obsolete now because the initramfsless boot handling
is now handled via setting GRUB_FORCE_PARTUUID in /etc/default/grub.d/40-force-partuuid.cfg.
In test images I have verified that GRUB_FORCE_PARTUUID is set and that
boot speeds have not regressed.
LP: #1875400
