After talking to some people, it may seem that we can fix this, albeit not in the short term. Keeping this open as a tracking bug. General idea is to have the user decide: 1. whether to opt for safety (i.e. be sure that the system will always boot even when zypper is interrupted). This means keeping mkinitrd after every single package that touches the kernel or dracut 2. whether to go for speed, i.e. delay mkinitrd until zypper is done installing all updates and then have zypper run mkinird. However, I do not see a way to have both.