This is a resurrection of a patch series from a few years back, first brought to the dm maintainers in 2010. It creates a way to define dm devices on the kernel command line for systems that do not use an initramfs, or otherwise need a dm running before init starts.
This has been used by Chrome OS for several years, and now by Brillo (and likely Android soon). The last version was v4: https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/104860/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/104861/ -Kees
