Features/Dracut

Dracut

Summary

Dracut is a replacement for nash/mkinitrd.

Owner

• Name: Harald Hoyer

• email: harald@redhat.com

Current status

• Targeted release: 12
• Last updated: 2009-07-15
• Percentage of completion: 90%

Working:

• normal disk with md/dm raid, LVM, crypto
• NFS
• iSCSI
• NBD

TODO:

• FCoE
• IPv6

Detailed Description

Dracut is a generic, modular initramfs generation tool that can be used across various distributions.

See also Dracut

Benefit to Fedora

Replace nash/mkinitrd with a tool, that is maintained by a cross distribution community.

Scope

All functionality of nash/mkinitrd has to be implemented and tested in dracut. Still missing is netboot (also from iscsi) and proper raid support.

How To Test

Use the created initrd on any machine to boot from any root partitions.

User Experience

Switching root partitions should be more flexible.

Dependencies

none

Contingency Plan

Fallback to mkinitrd.

Documentation

• Sourceforge Project http://sourceforge.net/projects/dracut/
• git git://dracut.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/dracut
• Trac Instance: http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/dracut/
• Mailing List: initramfs@vger.kernel.org

LWN article: http://lwn.net/Articles/317793/

Release Notes

• mkinitrd/nash has been replaced by dracut, which uses standard tools and scripts to boot from the root partition.

Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/Dracut