What is dracut and dracut shell ?

When you do troubleshooting with linux, you will sometimes face issues when some kernel module missing in Initrd or Initial ram disk and you are required to make changes in this initrd file.

Here comes the concept of Dracut or dracut shell….

To understand this, just reboot your system with “init 6” and observe below message on screen…

Above we can see, what is dracut and what is does ?

What is dracut:- The daemon or shell or process responsible to mount root 
filesystem as per the UUID/label mentioned in front of root= parameter in 
grub and then it is responsible to switch root 
from init ram filesystem to our filesystem root.

Hence in case you have issues with your initial ram filesystem or disk, then you will be dropped to dracut shell to troubleshoot issues with your disk.

Sometimes there are missing ucodes/kernel modules due to which you will be dropped to the dracut shell so that you can load the appropriate modules.

Hence we can define dracut shell as:

Dracut Shell:- A shell based on the temporary filesystem loaded 
on RAM first i.e. initrd shell.

If we summarize complete above tutorial, we can understand that DRACUT is a tool/shell which provides initramfs/initrd image to boot our Linux OS.

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