According to Collabora’s latest report on their contributions to the Linux 5.1 kernel, which arrived last week, it is now possible to mount and boot a mapped device by adding a kernel parameter via command-line at boot time, thus bypassing initramfs image. For Linux kernel 5.1, twelve Collabora’s developers also contributed 64 commits and 111 sign-offs, along with lots of bug reports and testing. All previous kernel versions required the presence of an initramfs image to boot the system to a file system locate in a device-mapper device, but there were many cases where users couldn’t use an initramfs image, so this new feature comes in handy when you want to boot to a device-mapper device without the need of an initramfs image, just by using a simple kernel boot parameter.