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

Ray Strode halfline at gmail.com
Sun Oct 4 22:44:47 UTC 2009


Hi,

> 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?
This seems like a misfeature in dracut for LiveCD or otherwise.

The initrd should be about getting / mounted read-only and nothing else.

There's a reason why plymouth doesn't identify the volume in the initrd.
Plymouth is graphical and so would need to ship fonts, font
renderering libraries,
and translations in the initrd to display text. That's a non-starter.

It's okay though, because in most cases the user should only ever get
asked for one passphrase from the initrd,
so we don't need to show anything but a lock icon and an entry box.

If that's no longer the case in a dracut world, we probably need to fix dracut.

The alternative would be to drop to the console when unlocking and
show untranslated messages.

--Ray




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