Nigel Kukard posted an announcement for an early version of "BootUtils". The utilities currently support the ext2, ext3, jfs, reiserfs and xfs filesystems. He explained:

"BootUtils is a collection of utilities to facilitate booting of modern Kernel 2.6 based systems. BootUtils is designed for initramfs, although volunteers to add support for initrd are welcome. The process of finding the root volume either by label or explicit label= on the kernel command line, mounting it and 'switchroot'ing is automated. BootUtils can also drop to emergency shell if the root volume cannot be mounted. Why not even start sshd and allow admin login if the box is in a remote location?"