After patching, size of the initramfs for the new kernel is very large (200MB or more)

Issue

Note: For issues with RHEL 9.7/10.1/7.9/8.10 or older versions please see solution 6897791

The size of the initramfs for the new 9.8/10.2 kernel is much larger then previous kernels.

# ls -lh /boot/initramfs*
-rw-------. 1 root root 86M Nov 14  2025 /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-7048e70730be4285b6df3e232fdddb41.img
-rw-------. 1 root root 230M Jun 18 20:38 /boot/initramfs-5.14.0-687.15.1.el9_8.x86_64.img <<<<<
-rw-------. 1 root root 40M May 23 16:29 /boot/initramfs-5.14.0-570.114.1.el9_6.x86_64.img
-rw-------. 1 root root 40M May 23 16:29 /boot/initramfs-5.14.0-687.10.1.el9_8.x86_64.img

If /boot runs out of space during a kernel-update then it can lead to a kernel panic when booting:

[    3.753512] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
[    3.754792] CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0 Not tainted 5.14.0-687.15.1.el9_8.x86_64 #1
[    3.756022] Hardware name: Amazon EC2 t3.medium/, BIOS 1.0 10/16/2017
[    3.757022] Call Trace:
[    3.757418]  <TASK>
[    3.757758]  dump_stack_lvl+0x33/0x50
[    3.758340]  vpanic+0x129/0x2f0
[    3.758855]  panic+0x58/0x60
[    3.759327]  ? list_bdev_fs_names+0x77/0xa0
[    3.759993]  mount_root_generic+0x278/0x280
[    3.760656]  prepare_namespace+0x65/0x250
[    3.761287]  kernel_init_freeable+0x2f3/0x320
[    3.762349]  ? __pfx_kernel_init+0x10/0x10
[    3.763082]  kernel_init+0x16/0x1c0
[    3.763636]  ret_from_fork+0x2b/0x50
[    3.764202]  </TASK>
[    3.816664] Kernel Offset: 0xda00000 from 0xffffffff81000000 (relocation range: 0xffffffff80000000-0xffffffffbfffffff)
[    3.824823] ---[ end Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) ]---