minimal initramfs script

2026-09-10T12:59:27Z

After several years having Debian as my main Linux distro, I've decided to go back to Gentoo, the distro who caught my attention since day one. However, my root partition is encrypted. While Debian has an out-of-the-box solution that makes everyone's life easier and almost transparent, Gentoo goes the opposite way. You have to connect the dots and make it work yourself. I had to stop, plan for a moment, and get ready.

In this short post, I'll be sharing the steps I took, the shell scripts, and how I wired up a minimal init script, that I called initramfs, although it's not quite that, this is much smaller and single purposed, decrypt my root partition.

Long story short, I needed to find a way to decrypt, mount and boot my new OS having the root partition encrypted. Using Gentoo's live-cd I was able to try the script partially, and confirm the decryption works. All I needed was having a busybox environment with all crypt libs on it. Using Gentoo itself for that, I compiled some packages with static linked dependencies.

Then build the initial script that's going to do all the heavy-lifting.

TL;DR, here are the scripts:

Create the initramfs directory, embed busybox and the crypt libs and tools on it

#!/bin/sh
set -e
STAGE="${1:-/usr/src/initramfs}"

mkdir -p "$STAGE"/{bin,sbin,lib,dev,proc,sys,mnt/root,run}

cp /sbin/busybox "$STAGE/bin/"
"$STAGE/bin/busybox" --install -s "$STAGE/bin"

cp /sbin/cryptsetup "$STAGE/sbin/"
cp /sbin/lvm "$STAGE/sbin/"

for bin in /sbin/cryptsetup /sbin/lvm; do
    ldd "$bin" | awk '{print $3}' | grep -v '^$'
done | sort -u | while read -r lib; do
    mkdir -p "$STAGE$(dirname "$lib")"
    cp -L "$lib" "$STAGE$lib"
done

cp init "$STAGE/init"
chmod +x "$STAGE/init"

echo "Staged tree ready at $STAGE — cd there and run the cpio|gzip packaging step."

create the init script (it needs to be called only init) at /usr/src/initramfs

#!/bin/sh

rescue_shell() {
    echo "Something went wrong v3. Dropping to a shell."
    exec /bin/sh
}

mount -t proc none /proc
mount -t sysfs none /sys
mount -t devtmpfs none /dev
mkdir -p /run/cryptsetup
export DM_DISABLE_UDEV=1

ROOT=$(sed -n 's/.*\broot=\([^ ]*\).*/\1/p' /proc/cmdline)

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 gentoo_root || rescue_shell
lvm vgchange -ay || rescue_shell

mount -o ro "$ROOT" /mnt/root || rescue_shell

exec switch_root /mnt/root /sbin/init

Finally generate the image that goes to /boot and grub

#!/bin/bash

KERNEL="7.2.4-gentoo"

cd /usr/src/initramfs

find . | cpio -o -H newc | gzip > /boot/initramfs-$KERNEL.img

grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Done. With luck, you should have a minimal setup ready to decrypt and boot your OS. Feel free to get in touch and ask for help, if needed. I have these scripts versioned on my personal repo, find then here: https://github.com/thermcampos/gentoo-config-files/tree/main/kernel

That's all. Thanks for reading.

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minimal initramfs script