Comment # 1 on bug 1182318 from Michal Suchanek

The posttrans scripts are not executed when zypper fails or crashes, and rpm
does not track script execution status so the scripts are never retried.

Possible mitigations:

 - tell grub scripts that initrd is needed for packaged kernels (eg place a
file together with the kernel) and make grub not list kernels that lack initd
in menu

 - instead of creating initrd synchronously set a flag that initrd is to be
created and start initrd creation in the background. If the flag is set again
the initrd is re-created once finished. In posttrans wait for background
creation to finish. background initrd creation with restart already used by
kdump service.