Disks improvements in GNOME 3.6

Just a short exposition of new features and changes in the Disks and udisks releases that will ship with GNOME 3.6

• There are now configuration dialogs for power management for ATA disks, see these two screenshots. Implementation-wise, it's backed by udisks configuration files, see the udisks man page for details. In the future we may add more disk and block device settings (for example, for controlling write-back/write-thru caching)
• The Disks application will now show a Zzz icon if a disk is in standby mode. It looks like this. You can also manually put a disk into standby mode and also wake it up
• There is now a way to erase a disk by filling it with zeroes. If the disk supports the ATA SECURE ERASE command (all modern ATA hard disks from the last decade or so), we support that as well. The erase type is selected from a combo box. In the erase confirmation dialog we also now offer guidance for all three cases since each of them have interesting implications (quick format, overwrite, ATA secure erase). The link in the last warning points the user to the ATA Secure Erase page on the Linux ATA Wiki. Hopefully this guidance is useful for people donating/selling old disks/devices (e.g. remind them to wipe)
• Long-running jobs are now displayed in the Disks user interface along with a way to cancel the job as well
• There's a new "Disk Image Mounter" application for attaching (you've guessed it), disk images. It comes with MIME type associations and in Fedora 18 it is the default application for ISO files. This means that if you double click an ISO file in Files, this application is invoked and it simply just sets up the loop device.
• Combined with this GVfs change the desktop bits will Do The Right Thing(tm) when the user sets up a loop device (don't worry, we don't do anything automatic if your shell script calls losetup(8) - it only affect loop devices set up via the udisks D-Bus interface). For example, if the image contains an installable OS, the desktop will go on to prompt the user to install the OS in the disk image. Note that the machinery is exactly the same as for physical media / devices - e.g. it works with partitioned disk images, the user is prompted to unlock LUKS volumes in the disk image etc. For example, for a ISO image of a Video DVD, the desktop will suggest opening whatever app is registered for x-content/video-dvd (normally Totem but could also be a 3rd party DVD player claiming to support that MIME type)
• The GVfs bits will also toggle the autoclear flag for the loop device when it mounts / unlocks the loop device (or a partition on the loop device) - this is so the disk image is detached when the last user stops using it. This flag can also be toggled from the Disks application, see this screenshot
• After a good and healthy discussion, the desktop shell now offers to save the LUKS passphrases in the keyring again (removed in 3.4, back in 3.6!). So it was a natural thing to make the Disks application read it when unlocking the volume
• Speaking of passphrases, Disks is now using libpwquality and GtkLevelBar. It looks like this
• By popular demand, the benchmark feature that was lost in the Disks/udisks rewrite that landed in GNOME 3.4 is now back - it now looks like this. Not only is it back, it's back in style: write benchmarks are now non-destructive (just use ECC memory, please) and the graph is updated while the benchmark is underway. You can also configure how many samples to make etc.. Also, benchmarking isn't constrained to whole disks anymore - you can now do it on any volume or block device (for example this RAID-6 array). It's a handy little feature

Of course, the GNOME Disks changes are just the user-visible bits. The "lower half" of the Disks application (basically invisible to end users) is called udisks and happens to be shared with other user interfaces including KDE and all the other user interfaces built on top of GLib/GTK+. For udisks changes, see its git repository for details.

Looking forward to GNOME 3.8

Some of the things I'm planning to work on in the future (hopefully some of it will land in GNOME 3.8) include

• Filesystem/partition resizing - not that interesting of a feature on its own, but incredibly useful in an installer setup where you want to dual-boot with another OS. It shouldn't be that hard to implement since the functionality more or less exists and the main job here is a) add a couple of methods to the Filesystem and Partition D-Bus interfaces; and b) design and implement the UI in Disks. I'm planning to collaborate on the udisks bits with the KDE developer who filed the bug
• Linux MD Raid support in udisks and Disks. We actually had somewhat decent support for this in the old version of udisks/Disks (see these screenshots for example) but it was removed in the rewrite as it was implemented in a hurry without a lot attention to design. Turns out there's still quite a bit of interest from several parties to add back this functionality plus also supporting external metadata and firmware/platform features in a meaningful way. To keep complexity down, we'll probably only allow creating arrays from whole disks as this is the recommended way to do RAID (users can still use mdadm(8) to create arrays on partitions if they so desire)
• Simple iSCSI initiator support - there's already git branches for this in the gnome-disk-utility and udisks repos but it's probably somewhat out of date by now. Anyway, the idea is really simple - just provide a simple front-end to the most common features provided by Linux Open-iSCSI. Some old screenshots showing the work I've already done are here and here

Now an obvious question comes to mind: why should Disks support complicated stuff like MD-RAID and iSCSI? Honestly, for the last couple of years, I've been bouncing back and forth between wanting / not wanting complicated and advanced features like this. However, recent discussions in the GNOME community has put me on a trajectory where I'm more and more convinced that GNOME should try harder to cater to, uh, workstation users (for want of a better word).

If workstations are part of GNOME's mission statement then it follows that you want to enable users to, say, easily set up a beefy workstation with eight disks in a RAID configuration so rebuilding the OS goes faster, easily connect to the lab SAN for if you're into science and so on. Things like that. No matter how good, user-friendly and well-documented commands and configuration files are, I don't think saying "just use the command-line or edit this or that file in /etc" is a super-satisfying answer.

Authorization Rules in polkit

For the past couple of weeks, I've been working on rewriting the part of polkit that actually makes the authorization decision: the polkit authority.

Some history

In its current implementation, the so-called polkit local authority ended up being one of these things that never really worked well for the (relatively small subset of) users with a need to configure it. First of all the local authority was never really supposed to be the main polkit authority... back then, we envisioned that in an Enterprise setting, you'd have something like FreeIPA to handle permissions and authorization and this would in turn provide a polkit backend responsible for answering authorization questions from applications (sadly this haven't materialized yet but with this new work it could be we're a lot closer).

Second of all, the local authority had some serious usability problems, in fact so many that I early on re-purposed a bug for the rewrite. I think I basically concluded that it's just too hard to even do simple things and the key-file based format and priority rule scheme for the .pkla file format wasn't really helping. It's also really hard to test .pkla files.

Defining the problem

After thinking about this problem on and off for a while (while working on other things, mostly udisks/GNOME Disks and all the GDBus stuff), I identified the following requirements:

1. There is no one-size-fits-all - for example some admins want to allow all users in a group to do the action xyz, while other admins want the opposite (forbid users in a group to do the action xyz). Similarly, some admins want black-lists ("allow anything but action xyz") and some want white-lists ("only allow actions xyz, abc, ..."). Some admins even want to have the result depend on the time ("don't allow xyz on school nights").
2. It would be good to have more information than just the action available when making a decision. For example for mounting or formatting a disk, it would be nice to have the device file or serial number or name and e.g. make the decision depend on this. For connecting to a wireless access point, having access to its ESSID would be great (to only allow connections to ESSID's in a whitelist) and so on.
3. Some admins may want to use external programs so there should be some facility available for this. Although this can't be the primary interface because forking a process every time someone calls CheckAuthorization() is a recipe for disaster [1].
4. Ideally, it should be easy test authorization rules - after all, this has to do with security so being able to easily (and automatically) test that your rules Does The Right Thing(tm) would be, uhm, great

A lot of these requirements are actually similar to the requirements you have for udev rules. And a lot of the constraints are similar as well, especially the fork-fest part.

Another thing that's important to identify is who is going to end up using this. The answer here is mostly "Enterprise Admin" although in reality a lot hobbyist end up using it because, well, they like to tinker around. Some users of Linux distributions with broken defaults (see below) may also need to undo the damage done by the distribution so they can actually use their computer. All in all, one can probably assume that the target user here is relatively skilled, ie. can read the provided documentation and is at least capable of copy-pasting some snippet from a website into a file in /etc as root and check that it has an effect.

[1] : History lesson: before we had udevd(8), the kernel forked /sbin/hotplug for every hotplug event. And /sbin/hotplug, being a shell script and all, itself forked another ten shell scripts or so in /etc/hotplug.d/and these forked other shell-scripts and... the result was that hotplugging a USB hub full of devices could easily take minutes because tens of thousands of /bin/sh-instances were forked. Awesometown. Today udevd(8) does the same in less than a second without forking a lot of extraneous processes.

Just embed JavaScript

The first requirement clearly indicates that we want some kind of programming language. However, inventing your own programming language is rarely a good idea so I decided to just embed a JavaScript interpreter (specifically SpiderMonkey) and try that out.

For the second requirement, I just exposed information we already have to the rules engine. I also rewrote the "Writing polkit applications" chapter to mention that mechanisms should use this feature as well as a ton of other advice. [2]

For the third requirement, spawning programs, I added a simple polkit.spawn() method.

The fourth requirement, testing, is fulfilled by just observing that the polkit authorization rules are JavaScript files that the user can test any way they want by trivially mocking the Polkit, Action and Subject types via Duck Typing in their favorite server-side JavaScript environment (gjs, node.js, seed etc.).

After a couple of prototyping attempts, I ended up with something that isn't too awful - see for yourself in the polkit(8) man page in the AUTHORIZATION RULES section. I also ended up adding a number of tests for this, including a test to ensure that even runaway-scripts are terminated. Over all, I'm very satisfied with the result.

[2] : I also included common-sense advice like "don't ask for a root password for adding printer queues" in this section

Wait, isn't embedding a JS interpreter inherently dangerous?

Embedding a JS interpreter is actually perfectly safe. First of all, it all runs inside the polkitd(8) system daemon (which runs without privileges, see below). Second of all, all data passed to the rules are either trusted or from a process that is trusted (except where designated untrusted, e.g. pkexec(1)'s command_line variable). Third, being an interpreted language, we can actually sensibly terminate runaway scripts.

Hmm, OK, but you are bloating Linux anyway. You suck.

The only new dependency here is libmozjs185.so.1 which in turn depends on the C++ runtime and NSPR (which NSS also depends on and most Linux installs have this library). Note that you also already need a JS interpreter for proxy server auto-configuration. It's also possible (or will be, at least) to just not install polkitd(8) at all (or disable/mask it using systemd) while still having the client-side libraries installed.

Other features

Apart from the new authorization rules engine, I also made the polkitd(8) system daemon run as the unprivileged polkitd user instead of root (much safer for obvious reasons). The main reason why this hadn't been done before had to do with the fact that polkitd(8) was loading backends via an extension system and we didn't really know if some future backend had to run as root. Since I decided nuke the extension system, we no longer need to make such assumptions so changing it was straightforward.

A while ago, I also added the pkttyagent(1) command on request from Lennart for optional use in systemctl(1). Optional here means that it's a soft dependency - systemctl(1) works fine even when polkit is not installed.

Next steps

I've been doing all this work on the wip/js-rule-files branch and today I merged this branch to the master branch. I plan to do a new 0.106 release shortly and put it in what will end up being Fedora 18.

Once that's available, I plan to file bugs against the most important mechanisms (such as NetworkManager) so they can start exporting variables to be used in authorization rules and also properly document this.

Simpler, Faster, Better

For the past year or so, I've been working on and off on the next version of udisks and what is now known as the Disks GNOME application (née palimpsest):

Hello Shiny!

This code will ship in the upcoming GNOME 3.4 and Fedora 17 releases.

The motivation for rewriting udisks and palimpsest hadn't really anything to do with the user-experience per se - the main motivation was to port udisks/palimpsest code from dbus-glib to use all the D-Bus work I've been doing the last couple of years, e.g.

• Use new GDBus routines from GLib
• Use the org.freedesktop.DBus.ObjectManager interface
• Use the org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties::PropertiesChanged signal
• Use gdbus-codegen(1)

Since everything had to be rewritten to use new interfaces, I figured that while I was at it, I'd redesign the UI part as well. A big thanks goes to Jon McCann for helping me design the application and enduring my complicated descriptions of how storage works on Linux.

Cleanups

There's a couple of new user-visible features in the code but before delving into specifics I want to mention that we've also removed a couple of features. Why? Because the old interface was quickly becoming a mess and it certainly wasn't very GNOME3-ish neither in the way it looks nor the simplicity you'd expect. If there is one mantra that has driven this effort, it may very well be "don't try to expose everything in a desktop user interface" and I think this is something that extends to the greater GNOME 3 effort as well.

For example, the extent to which Disks support LVM (and MD RAID for that matter) is now that we only show the mapped devices (if the VG / array is running) and, except for e.g. showing the user-friendly (!) name /dev/vg_x61/lv_root instead of /dev/dm-2, that's pretty much it. You can still, of course, manipulate the device (such as changing the file system label) and its contents as if it was any other device (see below), but we no longer provide any UI to configure LVM or MD RAID itself - you are expected to use the command-line tools to do so yourself.

Another important goal of Disks that hasn't changed is the realization that we're only one tool among many - we don't pretend to own your machine and that we're the only tool you'll ever use. That's why you'd e.g. see device names in the user interface (without being primary identifiers) so you can copy/paste that to the terminal and use command-line tools on the device. Additionally, thanks to the notifications from udev, the Disks application will update its UI in response to changes you do from e.g. the command-line or other applications - for example, if you mkfs(8) a new filesystem, or add a new partition using parted(8).

Common operations

Fundamentally, the Disks end-user interface hasn't changed much (it's still basically a tree-view on the left and volume grid on the right), however instead of lots of buttons, most operations are initiated by accessing a popup-menu either for the volume or drive in question. Common operations like formatting a device, changing the passphrase of an encrypted device, creating a new partition, formatting a disk, checking ATA SMART data are pretty much the same, although the UI has been cleaned up some. Pretty basic stuff, really, no big changes here.

Mount and encryption options

A common theme since I started working on storage in desktop Linux (some eight years ago), is that some people are extreme control-freaks about where a device is mounted and with what options. Most of the time you won't need this (the desktop shell will automount the device somewhere in /media) but there's a couple of important uses for this. One common example, is that people are using their computer to serve media files to their TV or Media Jukebox over the LAN. For this to work you often need to make sure the device is mounted in say, /mnt/foo (because /mnt/foo is what you added to the config file for the media server) and that this happens before the media server is started.

We've been trying all sorts of things over the years (the most complex being the now deprecated gnome-mount program reading mount options from e.g. GConf) and while some of these things have worked great in theory, they were just way too complex; our users just didn't have the time nor the inclination to figure out how to use our software... and I don't blame them... my experience is that if the effort more complex than editing a single text file with emacs(1) or vi(1) you've lost most people.

(In retrospect, realizing when your software is too complex for people to use takes much longer than you think - worse, I suspect a lot of developers don't realize just how over-engineered their software is until it's too late.)

So, the way it has worked the past few years in GNOME is that if you want specific configuration for mounting a specific disk, I've been telling people to just add an entry to /etc/fstab and use one of the symlinks  in /dev/disk. Works great. So it was only natural to actually add some UI for this and the result is this dialog

Editing an entry in the /etc/fstab file

which basically correspond to the fields in the /etc/fstab file.

A nice touch here (I think) is that the "Identify As" combo box allows you to select any of the /dev/disk symlinks that currently point to the device, for example, you can make the given mount options apply to any disk connected to the given USB port (actually, partition 1 from said disk). This is of course nothing new, you've always been able to use any /dev/disk symlink in the /etc/fstab file but I bet most people don't have time or inclination to find out exactly what link to use so most just end up using e.g. /dev/sdb1 because that works right now for them. Again, the good old "if it's more complex than editing a single file" line of thought.

(My secret hope here is that even old Unix neck-beards will want to use such UI dialogs instead of editing the /etc/fstab file manually ... or at the very least realize how such a combo box adds value before they flame the tool to death :-) ...)

As for /etc/fstab, we also have similar UI for the /etc/crypttab file except that this is a bit more complex insofar that we allow managing passphrase-files to e.g. automatically unlock a device on boot-up... you may need encrypted /etc for this to be secure - this of course depends on your threat model but it could be you have provisions for securely shredding all content in /etc/luks-keys when needed etc. etc., I don't know :-)

Anyway, the nice thing about using standardized files such as /etc/fstab and /etc/crypttab for this, is interoperability with the rest of the OS - in particular, you can edit the mount options e.g. the boot file-system from the Disks application. Additionally, things like systemd will actually mount devices referenced in the /etc/fstab file at start-up (unless the noauto option is used) which is something you really want for the media server use-case mentioned above.

Disk images and loop devices

Another new feature has to do with disk images - the Disks application now allows you to create and restore disk images (including showing the speed and estimated time left) which is handy especially e.g. from a rescue live cd (it's basically just a GUI for dd(1)). Additionally, there is UI for attaching disk images and using them and, thanks to my friend Kay Sievers, it even works with partitioned disk images

Loop device, with partitions, oh my!

which I think is pretty handy.

Desktop integration

Another important part of the equation is what the user sees when it comes to storage devices in general (e.g. in general, not only when using the Disks application). This is largely the domain of the Desktop Shell, the Files application (née Nautilus) and the file chooser. These pieces all rely on the GLib Volume Monitor APIs which is a high-level abstraction with a stable API/ABI that applications can use (among other things) to figure out what volumes to present in their user interfaces.

In a nutshell, the volumes to show is a complex mixture of physical storage devices (say, mountable filesystems residing on a plugged-in USB stick), devices backed by GVfs backends (say, digital cameras and iPod that are not block devices), GVfs network backends (e.g. smb:// network mounts) and non-storage mounts such as e.g. NFS mounts, FUSE mounts and fstab entries representing things that can be mounted but may not already be mounted.

Now, the way GVfs works is pretty complex (there are multiple volume monitor daemons and storage backends instances) but the important point is that the volume monitor responsible for device and fstab mounts has been updated to use udisks2, the same storage daemon used by the Disks application. In addition to returning GDrive, GVolume and GMount objects for storage devices, this volume monitor also return GVolume entries for /etc/fstab entries so you can e.g. mount a NFS server by clicking an icon in Files (again, a common user request), like this

Desktop Integration. Bringing it all together

Note that the name, icon and desktop visibility of the GVolume instance representing the NFS mount is controlled by mount options in the /etc/fstab file - see this write-up for more information.