It seems dracut makes a broken initramdisk image now if crypt-gpg module is selected to be included in the image. dracut -a "crypt crypt-gpg lvm dm" --kver 4.10.10-default-pciehp --force After booting I get in between the usual kernel-bootup messages: kbd_mode: can't open '/dev/tty': No such device or address setfont: LatArCyrHeb-16: No such file or directory Thanks to 'rd.shell rd.debug rd.retry=4' on kernel commandline I can get into a shell. Because of the above error my $(tty) is unset. Therefore the trick with setting 'GPG_TTY=$(tty) gpg ...' to maybe work around missing gpg-agent binary does not work because "$tty" is empty. I do not see in 'printenv | grep -i tty' any variable holding a pointer to my tty device. However, GPG_TTY=`tty` sets the variable but I assume this is only possible because I made dracut to include busybox and bash for me in the image. Running tty command returns /dev/tty1, btw.
