Please try out dracut

Project Discussion Foundations
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21

@winstonma and @soumyadghosh If you still see the issue after the kernel update, please report a bug with ubuntu-bug dracut-core to get a Launchpad bug report.

1 Like
22

I havenā€™t tested it anymore, so, Iā€™ll try it once again with my shiny new kubuntu installation and see how it goes

23

Install dracut was successful on my Oracular but deleted some files from boot directory so iā€™m unable to boot from old kernel 6 .11.0-8
n3-oracular is the partition with dracut, n7-oracular a similar install without dracut.

corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$ ls /media/corrado/n3-oracular/boot
config-6.11.0-9-generic      memtest86+x64.bin
efi                          memtest86+x64.efi
grub                         System.map-6.11.0-9-generic
initrd.img-6.11.0-8-generic  vmlinuz
initrd.img-6.11.0-9-generic  vmlinuz-6.11.0-9-generic
memtest86+ia32.bin           vmlinuz.old
memtest86+ia32.efi
corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$ ls /media/corrado/n7-oracular/boot
config-6.11.0-8-generic      memtest86+ia32.efi
config-6.11.0-9-generic      memtest86+x64.bin
efi                          memtest86+x64.efi
grub                         System.map-6.11.0-8-generic
initrd.img                   System.map-6.11.0-9-generic
initrd.img-6.11.0-8-generic  vmlinuz
initrd.img-6.11.0-9-generic  vmlinuz-6.11.0-8-generic
initrd.img.old               vmlinuz-6.11.0-9-generic
memtest86+ia32.bin           vmlinuz.old
corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$
24

Worked on my laptop - booting even seems a bit faster. Decrypting the disk on startup worked without problems:

System:
LENOVO
ThinkPad L14 Gen 3
21C5004FGE
Root mount:
/dev/mapper/vgkubuntu-root on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)

25

Boots faster ā€¦

System:
Dell Inc.
Inspiron
Inspiron 15 7510
Root mount:
/dev/mapper/luks-c42f72a8-4c65-46cc-9931-9826c023f7ea on / type btrfs (rw,noatime,compress=zstd:1,ssd,space_cache=v2,autodefrag,subvolid=256,subvol=/@)

26

Works for me on oracular:

System:
LENOVO
ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9
20XWCTO1WW
Root mount:
/dev/mapper/ubuntuā€“vg-ubuntuā€“lv on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)

27

Do you only want this to be done on 24.10, or would this work fine on 24.04?

28

Works on:

System:
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
ASUS Vivobook S 15
ASUS Vivobook S 15 S5507QA_S5507QAD
Root mount:
/dev/nvme0n1p17 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)

29

Please only test on 24.10 and newer. A lot of development work and changes went into dracut in 24.10. I havenā€™t checked which changes we would need to backport to 24.04 to have a similar smooth experience.

30

Tested again on my Ubuntu Plucky

## BEFORE dracut

corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$ systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 7.563s (firmware) + 11.563s (loader) + 5.435s (kernel) + 8.775s (userspace) = 33.337s 
graphical.target reached after 8.753s in userspace.
corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$

## WITH dracut

corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$ ls -alh /boot/initrd.img-*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 66M Nov 21 21:10 /boot/initrd.img-6.11.0-8-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35M Dec 17 16:28 /boot/initrd.img-6.11.0-9-generic
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 66M Dec 17 16:25 /boot/initrd.img-6.11.0-9-generic.orig
corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$

corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$ systemd-analyze time
Startup finished in 7.625s (firmware) + 22.787s (loader) + 3.704s (kernel) + 2.076s (initrd) + 8.451s (userspace) = 44.646s 
graphical.target reached after 8.437s in userspace.
corrado@corrado-n9-pp-upgraded:~$
31

System:
ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
ROG Strix
ROG Strix G834JY_G834JY
Root mount:
/dev/mapper/LVM-root on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/nvme0n1p1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0077,dmask=0077,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/mapper/boot_crypt on /boot type ext4 (rw,relatime)

sudo dracut -H --hostonly-mode=sloppy --force --fstab --uefi --regenerate-all

Generating UKI and loading them with systemd-boot works with my boot encrypted (Iam on FDE from 22.04). Now just need to figure out how to sign uki for secure boot and I can get farewell to grub.

32

System:
LENOVO
ThinkPad T14 Gen 1
20UES1K600
Root mount:
/dev/mapper/ubuntuā€“vg-ubuntuā€“lv on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)

Everything working fine so far on up-to-date plucky, with standard LUKS encrypted partition.

33

Sorry for the double post, but I just tried this also in the situation of a FIDO2 device decrypting the root partition, as described in ā€œExample 3ā€ of this page. Everything working fine so far. Same hardware as previous post.

34

System:
LENOVO
ThinkPad T470
20HES53U00
Root mount:
/dev/mapper/ubuntuā€“vg-ubuntuā€“lv on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)

Everything working fine. Using Yubikey FIDO2 to unlock LUKS.

35

Thanks everyone for testing. I posted our future plans on [Spec] Switch to Dracut

1 Like
36

System:
Microsoft Corporation
Surface
Surface Pro 5
Root mount:
/dev/mapper/ubuntuā€“vg-ubuntuā€“lv on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)
custom kernel: 6.12.3-surface-2
(see: GitHub - linux-surface/linux-surface: Linux Kernel for Surface Devices)

seems to work

37

Worked flawlessly here:

System:
Acer
Aspire 5
Aspire A515-52G
Root mount:
/dev/nvme0n1p3 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime)

38

Hereā€™s an uncommon setup for you: root on ZFS on NVMe on a Raspberry Pi 5. This worked after I figured out I needed to install the zfs-dracut package, which unfortunately depends on dracut, so I had to work around that.

System:
Raspberry Pi 5 Model B Rev 1.0
Root mount:
rpool/ROOT/ubuntu on / type zfs (rw,relatime,xattr,posixacl,casesensitive)
Boot mount:
/dev/nvme0n1p1 on /boot/firmware type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)
39

Thanks everyone for testing (especially those with uncommon setups).

zfs-dracut should probably depend on dracut-core instead of dracut.

1 Like
40

Created Bug #2098532 ā€œzfs-dracut should depend on dracut-core instead of...ā€ : Bugs : zfs-linux package : Ubuntu for fixing the zfs-dracut dependency.