Ubuntu’s developers have received the green light to make Dracut default in Ubuntu 25.10. This is foundational change to the way Ubuntu boots that was planned for this development cycle, but it didn’t land before the all-important feature freeze deadline.
The early stages of Ubuntu’s boot process aren’t super interesting (to most of us), so the key takeaway from this news is simply that Ubuntu is moving to a more efficient way of making its boot chain function – which is super important to all of us.
The change is now rolling out to Ubuntu 25.10 daily builds after a feature freeze except was granted. Dracut is now included in the core Ubuntu meta package as a desktop-recommends, and initramfs-tools (what it currently uses) removed from default installs.
Why is Ubuntu switching?
When you power on your laptop or PC it doesn’t launch into a full Ubuntu desktop because the kernel doesn’t yet know how to talk to your hardware.
For it loads a tiny temporary system called an initial RAM filesystem (initramfs). This has enough drivers and tools to find your storage, decrypt any drives (if needed) and mount your real filesystem. Then it hands off to the main Ubuntu system.
The tool that builds this crucial temporary system is what’s changing.
Why Dracut?
Dracut is a module-based tool used in Red Hat-based distros like Fedora to generate the initramfs, while Ubuntu has traditionally relied on initramfs-tools, a script-based system originally created for Debian.
Those hardcoded scripts try to predict what your system will need, whereas Dracut takes a dynamic approach by using udev (the system which manages hardware detection on Ubuntu) to figure things out during boot.
Dracut is module-based (which is easier to maintain or extend), supports newer technologies (like NVMe over Fabrics, aka NVMe-oF, which is useful in server and cloud deployments1), and is actively developed upstream (which is always welcome).
It also uses systemd, like the main Ubuntu OS (initramfs-tools doesn’t) which adds consistency between the early boot stages to the main system it launches.
Ubuntu has been testing Dracut for a while, but it hasn’t thus far been default.
Making a switch to Dracut now, ahead of next year’s Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (supported by Canonical for at least 5 years) will allow devs working on the distro devs to get vital real-world feedback to feed in to its plans for the next LTS.
You won’t notice a change
For Ubuntu, this switch makes the distro’s boot process more consistent, simplifies maintenance, and ensures that new and emerging hardware features could be taken advantage down the line.
For end users, this switch won’t be noticeable (as the tool used to build the initramfs is something most of us never need to interact with or configure) and the user-facing boot process won’t change.
This change only affects Ubuntu 25.10. If you run a stable Ubuntu release (like 24.04 LTS or 25.04), your boot process won’t change — not until you install or upgrade to 25.10 when released in October, that is.
- Ubuntu 25.10 server and cloud images still use initramfs-tools at the time of writing, so this change is for desktop only. ↩︎