Ubuntu Making Progress On Replacing initramfs-tools With Dracut
As a follow-up to the news from last October of Ubuntu considering Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation, that work remains ongoing with some improvements since having been prepared for the upcoming Ubuntu 25.04 release but it remains overall an active affair.
Benjamin Drung with Canonical published the specification a few days ago for switching the default initrd infrastructure from initramfs-tools to Dracut.
Using Dracut on the Ubuntu desktop and server will address shortcomings of initramfs-tools like the lack of NVMe-over-Fabric support as well as allowing Bluetooth keyboards to work during the LUKS disk encryption unlocking at boot time. The initramfs-tools also relies on a lot of "slow, fragile, hard to understand" shell code.
While Dracut is a win and used already by other Linux distributions, the Ubuntu transition remains ongoing due to testing and there being dozens of packages relying on initramfs-tools integration.
Ubuntu appears committed to going with Dracut, it appears to just be a matter of time until everything is ready for a complete transition. Those wanting to learn more about this effort can do so via this spec on Ubuntu Discourse for all the details.
Benjamin Drung with Canonical published the specification a few days ago for switching the default initrd infrastructure from initramfs-tools to Dracut.
Using Dracut on the Ubuntu desktop and server will address shortcomings of initramfs-tools like the lack of NVMe-over-Fabric support as well as allowing Bluetooth keyboards to work during the LUKS disk encryption unlocking at boot time. The initramfs-tools also relies on a lot of "slow, fragile, hard to understand" shell code.
While Dracut is a win and used already by other Linux distributions, the Ubuntu transition remains ongoing due to testing and there being dozens of packages relying on initramfs-tools integration.
Ubuntu appears committed to going with Dracut, it appears to just be a matter of time until everything is ready for a complete transition. Those wanting to learn more about this effort can do so via this spec on Ubuntu Discourse for all the details.