Ubuntu Considers Replacing initramfs-tools With Dracut

As a possible change for Ubuntu 25.04, Canonical is evaluating the use of Dracut to replace initramfs-tools for initrd generation on Ubuntu Linux.

Benjamin Drung of Canonical shared that they are looking at replacing initramfs-tools with Dracut for handling initrd generation on future versions of Ubuntu. With Ubuntu 24.10 there is Dracut available in the archive and should work on most systems while in the future it may replace initramfs-tools outright.

Dracut was started by Red Hat and used for many years now by the likes of Fedora and RHEL as well as openSUSE, / SUSE, and numerous other Linux distributions.

As part of deciding whether they want to use Dracut by default in future Ubuntu releases, they are soliciting community help in testing Dracut on Ubuntu Linux particularly for those on Ubuntu 24.10 where the latest Dracut is currently available in the archive.

They do warn though that Dracut currently doesn't work with booting from an encrypted ZFS volume, the Plymouth boot splash screen integration is not working on Ubuntu, iSCSI boot is not supported, and kdump-tools isn't working with it at the moment on Ubuntu.