dracut-shutdown.service(8)

dracut-shutdown.service8

Unpack the initramfs to /run/initramfs

Usage

dracut-shutdown.service

Overview

This service unpacks the initramfs image to /run/initramfs. systemd pivots into /run/initramfs at shutdown, so the root filesystem can be safely unmounted.

The following steps are executed during a shutdown:

• The system starts to shut down

• ``$prefix/lib/systemd/system/sysinit.target.wants/dracut-shutdown.service`` gets its ``ExecStop`` target triggered.

• ``dracut-shutdown.service`` executes ``/usr/lib/dracut/dracut-initramfs-restore`` which unpacks the initramfs to ``/run/initramfs``

• systemd kills all processes

• systemd tries to unmount everything and mounts the remaining read-only

• systemd checks if there is a ``/run/initramfs/shutdown`` executable

• if yes, it does a pivot_root to ``/run/initramfs`` and executes ``./shutdown``. The old root is then mounted on ``/oldroot``. ``/usr/lib/dracut/modules.d/[0-9][0-9]shutdown/shutdown.sh`` is the shutdown executable.

• shutdown will try to unmount every ``/oldroot`` mount and calls the various shutdown hooks from the dracut modules

This ensures, that all devices are disassembled and unmounted cleanly.

To debug the shutdown process, you can get a shell in the shutdown procedure by injecting "rd.break=pre-shutdown rd.shell" or "rd.break=shutdown rd.shell".

# mkdir -p /run/initramfs/etc/cmdline.d
# echo "rd.break=pre-shutdown rd.shell" > /run/initramfs/etc/cmdline.d/50-debug.conf
# touch /run/initramfs/.need_shutdown

In case the unpack of the initramfs fails, dracut-shutdown-onfailure.service executes to make sure switch root doesn’t happen, since it would result in switching to an incomplete initramfs.

Releases

6 releases since Debian 9 (Stretch); the text changed 5 times.

  1. 9
  2. 10
  3. 11
  4. 12
  5. 13
  6. Arch

Authors

Harald Hoyer

From dracut 111-1 in Arch Linux 2026-11-01. Parsed by carta from the page's man source.