Dracut -- Cross distribution initramfs infrastructure

As davej started talking about a few months ago at Kernel Summit and LPC, there's a lot of duplication between distros on the tools used to generate the initramfs as well as the contents and how the initramfs works. Ultimately, there's little reason for this not to be something that is shared and worked on by everyone. Added to this is the fact that everyone's infrastructures for this have grown up over a long-ish period of time without significant amounts of reworking for the way that the kernel and early boot works these days. Therefore I've started on a new project, dracut, to try to be a new initramfs tool that can be used across various distributions. From the README... 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 using the tool. There is also a mailing list that is being used for the discussion -- initramfs@vger.kernel.org. Currently, there are a few Fedora-isms which have crept in just as a result of it being the shortest path to solving some problems, but I'm actively trying to get those out sooner rather than later as well as getting to where I'm using it to boot my laptop. Comments and discussion welcome Jeremy