dracut/README

Dracut
------

This is the simple skeleton of a new initramfs infrastructure.
Information about our goals and aims can be found at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Initrdrewrite

Unlike existing initramfs's, this is an attempt at having as little as
possible hard-coded into the initramfs as possible.  The initramfs has
(basically) one purpose in life -- getting the rootfs mounted so that
we can transition to the real rootfs.  This is all driven off of
device availability.  Therefore, instead of scripts hard-coded to do
various things, we depend on udev to create device nodes for us and
then when we have the rootfs's device node, we mount and carry on.
This helps to keep the time required in the initramfs as little as
possible so that things like a 5 second boot aren't made impossible as
a result of the very existence of an initramfs.  It's likely that
we'll grow some hooks for running arbitrary commands in the flow of
the script, but it's worth trying to resist the urge as much as we can
as hooks are guaranteed to be the path to slow-down.

Also, there is an attempt to keep things as distribution-agnostic as
possible.  Every distribution has their own tool here and it's not
something which is really interesting to have separate across them.
So contributions to help decrease the distro-dependencies are welcome.

The git tree can be found at
git://fedorapeople.org/~katzj/dracut.git for now.  See the TODO
file for things which still need to be done and HACKING for some
instructions on how to get started.  There is also a mailing list that
is being used for the discussion -- initramfs@vger.kernel.org.  It is
a typical vger list, send mail to majordomo@vger.kernel.org with body
of 'subscribe initramfs email@host.com' 


Licensed under the GPLv2

Copyright 2008, Red Hat, Inc. -- Jeremy Katz <katzj@redhat.com>