Storage handling in GNOME

The GNOME 2.26 release in Fedora 11 will ship with a completely different stack for handling storage devices. The plan is to land all this work in the upstream GNOME 2.28 release and most of that work is done already.

Basically, we’ve switched away from one daemon to another and in the process we gained a few new features.

OMG, the disk is dying - using libatasmart

including letting the user inspect what his disk is trying to tell him. Kudos goes to Lennart for adding USB support, fixing issues with false positives in libatasmart and just for providing a really good library. And it looks like it’s working.

To really make this 100% useful, we probably want some kind of directory where system vendors shipping GNOME can drop an XML file and then the user can click a button “Order new disk” and get on with their life. Of course, then we need to handle the much harder problem of backup and data migration, but, hey, we want to solve that anyway.

So I also wrote this Palimpsest Disk Utility application



Kitchen sink of disk information

which also handles things like RAID devices and support for managing things like LVM and btrfs is planned as well. We’re also looking at changing the UI to be a bit more sane - something like this perhaps

Clean, leaner, simpler? Tell us in bug #579211!

Tomas, Matthias and I also worked on a simple formatting tool suitable for replacing the venerable gfloppy tool

Formatting tool

you can see the whole series of screenshots to see how the user interaction is supposed to be like.

Finally, I just merged a series of patches to GVfs for using this new machinery

OMG, pretty RAID icon!

Building this on top of a modern storage daemon, as opposed to HAL, means that your file manager (and any other app using GIO), is instantly updated as you repartition or reformat your disks. It even works if you are using command-line tools, etc. fdisk(8) or mkfs(8) - geek comfort FTW!

We might want some extensions to GIO to make working with RAID and encrypted devices (and in the future LVM) easier (such as unlock/lock/start/stop buttons in the file manager sidepane) or maybe we’re just going to rely on the system auto-assembling such things and leave it in Palimpsest. Decisions, decisions.

Another geek-comfort I added, is the ability to show user mountable fstab entries, that’s bug #536292. I was a bit reluctant to do this, I think instead we want native support in GVfs for nfs:// yet still use the kernel filesystem driver though some kind of setuid helper. Then we’d also fix NFS servers to publish the fact they exist using Avahi and then people can discover it in Nautilus’ computer:// window. Just cleaner and easier, I think. Combined with support for bookmarks on the GIO level, this should be a dream come true for people deplying systems in the enterprise.

Most of this work is part of the bigger HAL-ectomy - my good friend Kay has a good post outlining the plans for this.