Finally, parted and hfsutils are used to manage the boot filesystem. This utility simplifies the management of dm-crypt devices. Also required is a statically linked cryptsetup. This interface currently is preferred by the Fedora Project, and dm-crypt modules are provided by Fedora's kernel packages. This article focuses on the dm-crypt interface provided by the recent 2.6 Linux kernels. Several cryptoloop variations that provide an encrypted loopback device also exist. Several filesystem encryption interfaces are available for Linux.
In our case, this script also unlocks the encrypted root filesystem. This unpacked filesystem contains a script that traditionally loads kernel modules needed to mount the root filesystem. The current, stable kernel series, 2.6, optionally uses initramfs to help boot, Initramfs is a cpio archive that the kernel now knows how to unpack into a RAM-based disk. An understanding of how your computer boots is required, because unlocking an encrypted root filesystem is integral to the bootstrap process.
