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Booster - fast and secure initramfs generator

Booster initramfs generator

Initramfs is a specially crafted small root filesystem that mounted at the early stages of Linux OS boot process. This initramfs among other things is responsible for unlocking encrypted partitions and mounting it as a root filesystem.

Booster is a tool to create such early boot images. Booster is made with speed and full disk encryption use-case in mind.

Booster advantages:

There are other initramfs generators similar to booster: mkinitcpio and dracut.

Install

Arch Linux

Install booster package from the official repository.

At the installation time this package will create a number of booster images in your /boot/ directory:

$ ls -lh /boot/booster-*.img
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3.9M Dec 10 20:51 /boot/booster-linux.img

Void Linux

Install booster with xbps-install -S booster.

Run xbps-reconfigure -f linux to create the initramfs for a previously installed kernel.

Alpine Linux

Install booster using apk add booster.

Refer to /usr/share/doc/booster/README.alpine for bootloader configuration instructions (which depend on the desired setup).

Manual

Or optionally the image can be generated manually as booster build mybooster.img. Note that by default booster generates host specific images with minimum binaries needed for the current host. Providing --universal flag to booster tool will add more modules and tools and the result image will be bigger.

Once the image is generated it is time to configure the bootloader.

Usage

For usage instructions please see booster manpage using man booster or the same document available online.

Build

The project consists of 3 components:

These components use standard Golang tooling. To build any part do go build, to run tests do go test.

Run tests

cd {init,generator,integration_tests}
go test -v

Credits

Work on this project has been started as a part of Twitter's hack week. Huge thanks to my employer for its support of open-source development. Special thanks to Ian Brown.

Booster architecture has been inspired by Michael Stapelberg's project called distri. Initial version of booster borrowed a lot of ideas from the distri's initramfs generator.

Licence

See license