So you think you always need an initramfs to boot your Linux system. Not true and I will show you how. For example, here is my GRUB2 (/boot/grub2/grub.cfg) configuration file for Fedora 17: menuentry ‘Fedora Linux, no initramfs’ { set root=’hd0,msdos1′ linux /vmlinuz-3.3.4-5.fc17.i686.PAE rootfstype=ext4 root=/dev/sda2 rd.md=0 rd.lvm=0 rd.dm=0 SYSFONT=True KEYTABLE=us rd.luks=0 LANG=en_US.UTF-8 } Note there is no line specifying an initramfs! I was not aware that this was possible until I saw it demonstrated by Harald Hoyer. By the way, in case you were wondering, yes I manually edit my GRUB2 configuration file rather than using the numerous crazy GRUB2