I spent much of my Debian time in the last few weeks triaging and fixing bugs in initramfs-tools. All of the important bugs should be fixed, except for two where I needed more information from the submitter.

Due to the scope of these changes and potential for regressions, I've made a release candidate, version 0.121~rc2, rather than a full release. This is now available in experimental, and I would appreciate real-world testing feedback in the next few weeks. (If you're wondering what happened to rc1, that had 'unstable' as the distribution, which I didn't notice until after pushing the tag.)

From the release announcement, the major changes are:

  • Split initramfs-tools binary package into core and automation hooks, to allow for coinstallation of the core with other initramfs builders
  • Fail at build-time if busybox is wanted but not found
  • Rewrite build-time block device sysfs lookup to be generic
  • Include modules for all components of a multi-disk device
  • Use blkid to resolve LABEL=, UUID=, PARTLABEL= and PARTUUID= block device IDs at boot time, and do this much later
  • Change file copying to distinguish executables from other file types and to preserve symlinks
  • Run panic scripts just before dropping to a shell

Thanks to Andy Whitcroft, Boris Egorov, Laurent Bigonville, Roger Leigh, Roger Shimizu and Salvatore Bonaccorso for their patches which I applied in this version.