I recently built a initramfs with dracut in debian (051-1), but it seems this is still a problem on mainline. I have a config in /etc/dracut/dracut.conf.d that said: install_items+="/etc/usermode-helper.conf usermode-helper" An error elsewhere meant that those items were missing from the filesystem. dracut exited 0 with emitted messages like: dracut-install: ERROR: installing '/etc/usermode-helper.conf' dracut-install: ERROR: installing 'usermode-helper' dracut: FAILED: /usr/lib/dracut/dracut-install -D <dir> \ -a -l /etc/usermode-helper.conf usermode-helper In my usage, this is a FATAL error, and failure to catch it here meant lost time down the road. I "solved" it by capturing output and grepping for "ERROR:" or "FAILED:", but that is less than desirable. Is there a way to tell dracut to exit non-zero on errors like this? Scott