dracut, or should booting a LiveCD touch the hard disk?

[Chuck Anderson]

Dracut currently tries to find and activate all RAID, LVM, and LUKS 
partitions on the hard disks when booting the LiveCD.

Several of my systems are made up of many RAID, LVM, and LUKS 
partitions in various combinations.  Booting the LiveCD now goes and 
activates these and asks for passphrases that I have to "skip over" by 
entering blank/bogus values to get the system to boot up.  I now know 
that you can pass various "rd_*" options such as "rd_NO_LUKS" to grub 
to have dracut skip these things, but I was hoping for something 
better, perhaps a "skip" button.

The new behavior makes the LiveCD less independent of and more "tied" 
to the existing installations on the hard disk.  This is surprising 
and unexpected.  Many uses of LiveCD's expect that the live 
environment will be completely independent of, and unaffected by, what 
is on the hard disk.  This is no longer true.  It may be confusing for 
users of LiveCD's when an (unidentified) passphrase input text box 
pops up when booting the LiveCD.

What do others think?  Should the LiveCD by default access and 
activate storage volumes, including encrypted partitions, on the hard 
disks?  Should the LUKS prompts better identify the volume so that 
users know what passphrase to enter?

I would prefer a LiveCD that doesn't do anything to the hard disk at 
all, at least by default when booting up.  It should be 
"self-contained".  Perhaps we should create another entry in 
syslinux.cfg that enables rd_NO_LUKS by default, and call it "Boot 
without accessing hard disk".