dracut

dracut (the tool) is used to create an initramfs image by copying tools and files from an installed system and combining it with the dracut framework, usually found in /usr/lib/dracut/modules.d.

Unlike other implementations, dracut hard-codes as little as possible into the initramfs. 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.

Most of the initramfs generation functionality in dracut is provided by a bunch of generator modules that are sourced by the main dracut script to install specific functionality into the initramfs. They live in the modules.d subdirectory, and use functionality provided by dracut-functions to do their work.