A best practice for system configuration is to remove any unneeded software. It’s sometimes difficult to know exactly what is needed and what isn’t, but CentOS 7 minimal and CentOS 8 minimal both install a number of packages related to wireless networking. If you’re running a server or a VM there’s almost never a need for these to be present.
To identify packages, I used yum search (substitute dnf for yum on CentOS 8):
yum search wirelessI used the same command a redirected the output to a file:
yum search wireless >wireless_packagesTo get just the package names and convert it to a space-separated list, I used grep, cut, and paste:
grep -v Summary wireless_packages | cut -d. -f1 | paste -d' ' -sYou can remove them with the following command:
sudo yum remove iw iwl6000-firmware crda iwl100-firmware iwl1000-firmware iwl3945-firmware iwl4965-firmware iwl5000-firmware iwl5150-firmware iwl105-firmware iwl135-firmware iwl3160-firmware iwl6000g2a-firmware iwl6000g2b-firmware iwl6050-firmware iwl2000-firmware iwl2030-firmware iwl7260-firmwareiw and crda were not installed, so were ignored. The rest were removed.
This may seem trivial, but it frees up some disk space (~100MB) and it means that these packages won’t need to be updated in the future. Getting notifications from your monitoring systems or vulnerability management systems about updates or security updates to unused and unnecessary packages should be avoided.