make-initrd is a new, uevent-driven initramfs infrastructure based around udev.

The make-initrd is intended for creating initramfs images. The project consists of two main parts:

• Utilities for initramfs image creation (this includes determining the kernel modules required for the current hardware, adding required utilities, etc).
• Utilities that run inside the initramfs image at boot time.

The project has a modular structure. Its main idea is that to create the image you need (in the simplest case) to specify a list of characteristics (features) of the future image. The order of features does not matter. The user is not required to know how and in what order will apply stage.

Documentation about the project is located in the Documentation directory or on the wiki where the information is collected in one place.

To build a initramfs, you have to install the following software packages:

• gnu make is used to generate an initramfs image. This is a small but very powerful utility.
• bash is needed for all scripts in the project. This allows for increased portability from one distribution to another.
• busybox is used in the initramfs as runtime (submodule). This allows for increased portability from one distribution to another.
• libshell is used both when generating the image and in the initramfs (submodule).
• Utilities from coreutils are used in the initramfs image generation scripts.
• kmod is needed to calculate dependencies and load kernel modules in the initramfs.
• elfutils is optional but highly desirable for proper operation. This library is used to calculate the dependencies of binary utilities that are copied into the initramfs image.
• json-c is needed to get dependencies from ELF DLOPEN Medatata. The systemd-256 switched to dynamic loading of libraries that the authors consider optional.
• Compression libraries are required for the initramfs image parsing utilities: zlib, bzip2, xz, zstd.
• scdoc is used to generate man-pages.

$ ./autogen.sh
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install DESTDIR=/path/to/somewhere

If you want to use it in-tree:

$ ./configure --enable-local-build
$ make

Make-initrd is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 3.