Last month I wrote about [1]initrd support potentially being on its way out of the Linux kernel . For years Linux developers have wanted to phase out the classic initial RAM disk support from the Linux kernel and it looks like that day may finally be near with patches having been posted for removing the support.

Askar Safin was the Linux developer who a few weeks back brought up going ahead with the initrd removal and volunteered to submit such patches. On Friday evening those patches were posted to the Linux kernel mailing list for proposing the initrd removal.

The patches in initial form are 62 patches and lighten the Linux kernel by more than one thousand lines in total while reworking another thousand lines of code.

Askar Safin commented on [2]the patch series :

"This patchset removes classic initrd (initial RAM disk) support, which was deprecated in 2020. Initramfs still stays, and RAM disk itself (brd) still stays, too. init/do_mounts* and init/*initramfs* are listed in VFS entry in MAINTAINERS, so I think this patchset should go through VFS tree. This patchset touchs every subdirectory in arch/, so I tested it on 8 (!!!) archs in Qemu."

We'll see where the patches go from here if finally the classic initrd support is removed from the Linux kernel.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Initrd-Linux-Try-Removing-2025

[2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250913003842.41944-1-safinaskar@gmail.com/