Ubuntu 25.10 uses Dracut for booting — not that you’d notice. But as this foundational switch is a headline mention in release reviews and recaps (including ones on this site), you might be curious about what it means for you.
Name: Dracut.
Age: 15 years old, but new(ish) to Ubuntu.
Appearance: Invisible (it’s a boot-tech thing, not a shiny bauble).
Will it affect me? Ubuntu 25.10 uses Dracut for new installs. If you do a clean install, your computer boots using it. If chose to upgrade to Ubuntu 25.10 from an earlier version, you boot using what you had before. Whether your computer does or doesn’t use Dracut, it doesn’t really matter.
Then why am I reading an article about it? Because Ubuntu replacing initramfs-tools with Dracut for generating its initramfs (a temporary filesystem loaded into RAM to kick-start the boot chain) is a notable technical change. Innit.
You lost me at init-whateveritis… Here’s a trite analogy: if I told you to come to my house, you’d need to know where it is, right? Booting Linux is similar: the kernel needs to know where to find your filesystem so it can mount it. The first thing it does is load this ‘init’, which is a minimal filesystem with drivers and modules that let it detect, mount (and if needed decrypt) your disk. No two computers are alike so there are lot of potential configurations to navigate.
And this ‘initramfs’ thingy figures it out? “Nerds hate me for this one over-simplification” but yeah. The initramfs contains just enough tools and drivers to find and mount your real filesystem. Once that’s done, the kernel switches over to it and continues to boot normally, and initramfs vanishes. You can read more about how initramfs works at the kernel level, should you wish to.
I would, but I think I’m busy—forever. Fair enough!
Ubuntu booted fine without Dracut, so why did it switch? Ubuntu’s used initramfs-tools for decades, a Debian-sired project. Both initramfs-tools and Dracut generate an initramfs image (and each time you install a kernel update it’s regenerated). But, not unlike myself, the first of those is aging, difficult to maintain and slow to adapt to new technologies.
I’m struggling to stay awake. Tell me the difference. The difference is in how they do their job. The old one uses a bunch of hardcoded scripts to anticipate/cover as many configurations. The new way is modular and uses the udev device management to detect hardware. Ergo, there’s less guesswork and more precision. Plus, potentially leaner images leading to faster boot times.
Quick, continue before the other eye shuts too… Dracut supports newer technologies like TPM2, FIDO2 and network-bound disk encryption. It was created by Red Hat to be modular and distro agnostic, which is why most distros, including Fedora and openSUSE, use it. Now, in 25.10 Ubuntu joins the party (not an untz-untz kind of party, more paper plates, flat cola and awkward shuffling).
Is there any end-user benefit to using Dracut benefit? Tangibly? Ish. You should see a few milliseconds shaved off boot times. And you get the assurance that newer tech (like NVMe over Fabric) works with it. If you encrypt your disk with LUKS you can also use a Bluetooth keyboard to enter a passphrase, which is MODERNITY right there.
But otherwise… It’s an invisible, silent change. Nothing will change per se, and nothing will break (well, unless you have set up custom hooks for initramfs-tools – if so, you will need to port them to Dracut’s module system. If you don’t even know what that sentence even means, you’re good).
I still don’t understand any of this… You don’t need to. The point of a solid boot system is that you never have to think about it. All you need to know is that is Dracut is simply a more efficient way of doing the same thing as before: you press the power button on your laptop, something eventually appears.
Do say: “Booting Ubuntu is as boring as ever.”
Don’t say: “I think you meant to type Dracula.”
This is part of our Explainer series, where we take a wry glance at recent Ubuntu change (big, small and anything in between) to explain what’s actually happening, and whether you should care.