mkosi-initrd is a wrapper built on top of mkosi to build initrds using distribution packages (i.e., without picking files from the host filesystem or injecting custom functionality during the boot process). While booting from local devices mostly works out of the box, this talk aims to demonstrate that it is also possible to boot from network attached devices, setting up Network Manager and using NFS and iSCSI as examples. We want to show how the complex (and sometimes hacky) functionality implemented in traditional initrd generators can be translated using a systemd-only approach, and prove that these features can be shipped (and thus maintained) by their respective packages, and not by the initrd generator.

This work is part of the mkosi-initrd enablement on openSUSE (https://en.opensuse.org/Mkosi-initrd).