Manpages

NAME

initramfs-tools - an introduction to writing scripts for mkinitramfs

DESCRIPTION

initramfs-tools has one main script and two different sets of subscripts which will be used during different phases of execution. Each of these will be discussed separately below with the help of an imaginary tool which performs a frobnication of a lvm partition prior to mounting the root partition.

Kernel Command Line

The root filesystem used by the kernel is specified by the boot loader as always. The traditional root=/dev/sda1 style device specification is allowed. If a label is used, as in root=LABEL=rootPart the initrd will search all available devices for a filesystem with the appropriate label, and mount that device as the root filesystem. root=UUID=uuidnumber will mount the partition with that UUID as the root filesystem.

Standard
init= "<path to real init>"

the binary to hand over execution to on the root fs after the initramfs scripts are done.

initramfs.clear

clear screen at the beginning

initramfs.runsize

The size of the /run tmpfs mount point in bytes (suffixes are supported) or as percentage of your physical RAM. This parameter is used as the value of the size mount option to tmpfs. See https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt for details. The default is 10%.

root= "<path to blockdevice>"

the device node to mount as the root file system. The recommended usage is to specify the UUID as followed "root=UUID=xxx".

rootfstype

set the root file system type.

rootdelay

set delay in seconds. Determines how long mountroot waits for root to appear. The default is 180 seconds.

rootflags

set the file system mount option string.

nfsroot

can be either "auto" to try to get the relevant information from DHCP or a string of the form NFSSERVER:NFSPATH or NFSSERVER:NFSPATH:NFSOPTS. Use root=/dev/nfs for NFS to kick to in. NFSOPTS can be looked up in nfs(5).

BOOTIF

is a mac address in pxelinux format with leading "01-" and "-" as separations. pxelinux passes mac address of network card used to PXE boot on with this bootarg.

resume

The resume hook tries to autodetect the resume partition and uses the first swap partition as valid guess. It is possible to set the RESUME variable in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume. The boot variable noresume overrides it.

resume_offset

Specify the offset from the partition given by "resume=" at which the swap header of the swap file is located.

blacklist

disables load of specific modules. Use blacklist=module1,module2,module3 bootparameter.

Debug

netconsole

loads netconsole linux modules with the chosen args.

all_generic_ide

loads generic IDE/ATA chipset support on boot.

SCRIPTS

Valid boot and hook scripts names consist solely of alphabetics, numerics, dashes and underscores. Other scripts are discarded.

Configuration hook scripts
These are used to override the user configuration where necessary, for example to force use of busybox instead of klibc utilities.

Hook scripts
These are used when an initramfs image is created and not included in the image itself. They can however cause files to be included in the image. Hook scripts are executed under errexit. Thus a hook script can abort the mkinitramfs build on possible errors (exitcode != 0).

Boot scripts
These are included in the initramfs image and normally executed during kernel boot in the early user-space before the root partition has been mounted.

CONFIGURATION HOOK SCRIPTS

Configuration hook scripts can be found in /usr/share/initramfs-tools/conf-hooks.d. They are sourced by mkinitramfs after the configuration files in /etc and before running any hook scripts. They can override any of the variables documented in initramfs.conf(5), but this should be done only if absolutely necessary. For example, if a package’s boot script requires commands not provided by klibc-utils, it should also install a configuration hook that sets BUSYBOX=y.

HOOK SCRIPTS

Hooks can be found in two places: /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hooks and /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks. They are executed during generation of the initramfs-image and are responsible for including all the necessary components in the image itself. No guarantees are made as to the order in which the different scripts are executed unless the prereqs are setup in the script. Please notice that PREREQ is only honored inside a single directory. So first the scripts in /usr/share/initramfs-tools are ordered according to their PREREQ values and executed. Then all scripts in /etc/initramfs-tools are ordered according to their PREREQ values and executed. This mean that currently there is no possibility to have a local script (/etc/initramfs-tools) get executed before one from the package (/usr/share/initramfs-tools).

If a hook script requires configuration beyond the exported variables listed below, it should read a private configuration file that is separate from the /etc/initramfs-tools directory. It must not read initramfs-tools configuration files directly.

Header
In order to support prereqs, each script should begin with the following lines:

#!/bin/sh
PREREQ=""
prereqs()
{

}

case $1 in
prereqs)

esac

. /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hook-functions
# Begin real processing below this line

For example, if you are writing a new hook script which relies on lvm, the line starting with PREREQ should be changed to PREREQ="lvm" which will ensure that the lvm hook script is run before your custom script.

Help functions
/usr/share/initramfs-tools/hook-functions contains a number of functions which deal with some common tasks in a hook script:

Example: manual_add_modules isofs

Example: add_modules_from_file /tmp/modlist

Example: force_load cdrom debug=1

Example: copy_modules_dir kernel/drivers/ata

Including binaries
If you need to copy an executable or shared library to the initramfs module, use a command like this:

copy_exec /sbin/mdadm /sbin

mkinitramfs will automatically detect which libraries it depends on and copy them to the initramfs. This means that most executables, unless compiled with klibc, will automatically include glibc in the image which will increase its size by several hundred kilobytes.

Including a system firmware preimage (early initramfs)
If you need to prepend data to the initramfs image, you need to prepare it in a file, and call the prepend_earlyinitramfs function. The file can be disposed of as soon as the function returns.

Example:
TEMP_FILE=$(mktemp ...)
...
prepend_earlyinitramfs ${TEMP_FILE}
rm -f ${TEMP_FILE}

Exported variables
mkinitramfs sets several variables for the hook scripts environment.
MODULESDIR

corresponds to the linux modules dir.

version

is the $(uname -r) linux version against mkinitramfs is run.

CONFDIR

is the path of the used initramfs-tools configurations.

DESTDIR

is the root path of the newly build initramfs.

DPKG_ARCH

allows arch specific hook additions.

verbose

corresponds to the verbosity of the update-initramfs run.

BUSYBOX, KEYMAP, MODULES

are as described in initramfs.conf(5).

BUSYBOXDIR

is the directory where busybox utilities should be installed from, or empty if busybox is not being used.

BOOT SCRIPTS

Similarly to hook scripts, boot scripts can be found in two places /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/ and /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/. There are a number of subdirectories to these two directories which control the boot stage at which the scripts are executed.

Header
Like for hook scripts, there are no guarantees as to the order in which the different scripts in one subdirectory (see "Subdirectories" below) are executed. In order to define a certain order, a similar header as for hook scripts should be used:

#!/bin/sh
PREREQ=""
prereqs()
{

}

case $1 in
prereqs)

esac

Where PREREQ is modified to list other scripts in the same subdirectory if necessary.

Help functions
A number of functions (mostly dealing with output) are provided to boot scripts in /scripts/functions :

Example: log_success_msg "Frobnication successful"

Example: log_failure_msg "Frobnication component froobz missing"

Example: log_warning_msg "Only partial frobnication possible"

Example:

log_begin_msg "Frobnication begun"
# Do something
log_end_msg

Example: panic "Frobnication failed"

Subdirectories
Both /usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts and /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts contains the following subdirectories.

Boot parameters

EXAMPLES

Hook script
An example hook script would look something like this (and would usually be placed in /etc/initramfs-tools/hooks/frobnicate):

#!/bin/sh
# Example frobnication hook script

PREREQ="lvm"
prereqs()
{

}

case $1 in
prereqs)

esac

. /usr/share/initramfs-tools/hook-functions
# Begin real processing below this line

if [ ! -x "/sbin/frobnicate" ]; then

fi

force_load frobnicator interval=10
copy_exec /sbin/frobnicate /sbin
exit 0

Boot script
An example boot script would look something like this (and would usually be placed in /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-top/frobnicate):

#!/bin/sh
# Example frobnication boot script

PREREQ="lvm"
prereqs()
{

}

case $1 in
prereqs)

esac

. /scripts/functions
# Begin real processing below this line
if [ ! -x "/sbin/frobnicate" ]; then

fi

if [ ! -e "/dev/mapper/frobb" ]; then

fi

log_begin_msg "Starting frobnication"
/sbin/frobnicate "/dev/mapper/frobb" || panic "Frobnication failed"
log_end_msg

exit 0

Exported variables
init sets several variables for the boot scripts environment.

ROOTDELAY, ROOTFLAGS, ROOTFSTYPE, IP

corresponds to the rootdelay, rootflags, rootfstype or ip boot option. Use of ROOTDELAY is deprecated; you should implement a local-block boot script rather than delaying or polling.

DPKG_ARCH

allows arch specific boot actions.

blacklist, panic, quiet, resume, noresume, resume_offset

set according relevant boot option.

REASON

Argument passed to the panic helper function. Use to find out why you landed in the initramfs shell.

readonly

is the default for mounting the root corresponds to the ro bootarg. Overridden by rw bootarg.

rootmnt

is the path where root gets mounted usually /root.

UPDATING THE INITRAMFS FROM ANOTHER PACKAGE

Package maintainer scripts should not run update-initramfs directly. A package that installs hooks for initramfs-tools should include a triggers file containing:

activate-noawait update-initramfs

Kernel packages must call the kernel hooks as documented in the Debian Kernel Handbook.

A package that requires an initramfs to function, but is not a kernel package, should include a triggers file containing:

activate-await update-initramfs

KERNEL HOOKS

initramfs-tools includes hook scripts that are called by kernel packages on installation and removal, so that an initramfs is automatically created, updated or deleted as necessary. The hook scripts do nothing if the environment variable INITRD is set to No. This will be the case for kernel packages built with make deb-pkg and with CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD not set in the kernel config, or built with make-kpkg and not using the --initrd option.

DEBUG

It is easy to check the generated initramfs for its content. One may need to double-check if it contains the relevant binaries, libs or modules:

lsinitramfs /boot/initrd.img-3.16-3-amd64

FILES

/run/initramfs/fsck.log

Log of fsck commands run within the initramfs, with their output.

/run/initramfs/fsck-root

Exists only if fsck ran successfully for the root filesystem.

/run/initramfs/fsck-usr

Exists only if fsck ran successfully for the /usr filesystem.

AUTHOR

The initramfs-tools are written by Maximilian Attems <maks [AT] debian.org>, Jeff Bailey <jbailey [AT] raspberryginger.com> and numerous others.

This manual was written by David Härdeman <david [AT] hardeman.nu>, updated by Maximilian Attems <maks [AT] debian.org>.

SEE ALSO

initramfs.conf(5), mkinitramfs(8), update-initramfs(8), lsinitramfs(8).