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

* See also: Dracut
* See also: Dracut/Testing

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• mkinitrd/nash has been replaced by dracut, which uses standard tools and scripts to boot from the root partition.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