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.