Initrd

In computing, initrd (initial ramdisk) is a scheme for loading a temporary root file system into memory, which may be used as part of the Linux startup process. initrd and initramfs refer to two different methods of achieving this. Both are commonly used to make preparations before the real root file system can be mounted.

Many Linux distributions ship a single, generic Linux kernel image – one that the distribution's developers create specifically to boot on a wide variety of hardware. The device drivers for this generic kernel image are included as loadable kernel modules because statically compiling many drivers into one kernel causes the kernel image to be much larger, perhaps too large to boot on computers with limited memory. This then raises the problem of detecting and loading the modules necessary to mount the root file system at boot time, or for that matter, deducing where or what the root file system is.

To further complicate matters, the root file system may be on a software RAID volume, LVM, (on diskless workstations), or on an encrypted partition. All of these require special preparations to mount.

Another complication is kernel support for hibernation, which suspends the computer to disk by dumping an image of the entire contents of memory to a swap partition or a regular file, then powering off. On next boot, this image has to be made accessible before it can be loaded back into memory.

To avoid having to hardcode handling for so many special cases into the kernel, an initial boot stage with a temporary root file-system — now dubbed early user space — is used. This root file-system can contain user-space helpers which do the hardware detection, module loading and device discovery necessary to get the real root file-system mounted.

...
Wikipedia