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Udisks Improvements

Summary

Add support for LVM (and various other improvements) to the udisks and gnome-disk-utility stack


Owner


Current status

  • Targeted release: Fedora 13
  • Last updated: 2010-01-12
  • Percentage of completion: 50%

The new user interface has been included in gnome-disk-utility 2.29. The LVM and remote access support is about to land in rawhide. Support for multipath devices will come a little later.


Detailed Description

The palimpsest user interface in Fedora 12 works great for single-user machines and laptops, but it has some scalability issues on systems with many disks and partitions. It also has no notion of enclosures, expanders and similar contraptions that you meet when dealing with external storage. These problems have been addresses with a new user interface in gnome-disk-utility 2.29. The user interface has been improved in several other aspects as well, such as friendlier representation of S.M.A.R.T. information, and a nice way to benchmark disk performance.

The device-mapper stack was not properly integrated with udev in time for F12. This integration has happened in now, so udisks and palimpsest can support LVM and multipath devices.

Finally, while doing this work, David found time to implement a simple remote access facility for udisks, which allows a palimpsest application running on one machine to interact with the udisks daemon on another machine. The remote access is tunneled over ssh. The service is advertised via avahi, which allows palimpsest to show a nice browsable interface to connect to available udisks services.

Benefit to Fedora

Fedora gains a more uniform disk management solution that is well-integrated in the GNOME desktop. Considering that LVM is still enabled by default in new installations, having well-integrated LVM support in the desktop seems like a big benefit.


Scope

  • udev/device-mapper integration needs to happen (it already has)
  • new udisks and gnome-disk-utility releases with the added features need to happen


How To Test

Testing LVM support:

  1. Prerequisites:
    • A LVM-based installation
    • udisks and gnome-disk-utility packages installed
  2. Run palimpsest, (in the menus as Applications → System Tools → Disk Utility
  3. Verify that your volume groups appear in the list
  4. Select a volume group
  5. Verify that the graphic representation shows the logical volumes in the selected volume group
  6. Verify that you can start/stop volume groups and mount/unmount/stop/format logical volumes

User Experience

Screenshots of the new user interface with explanations can be found here. The screenshots also show the dialog that is used to connect to a remote udisks service.

Dependencies

None, beyond udev/device-mapper integration, which has already landed.


Contingency Plan

This feature is somewhat incremental. The new user interface has already landed. If LVM support is not ready in time, we can just ship with the new user interface. If LVM and remote access land, but multipath support is delayed beyond feature freeze, we can ship without multipath support.


Documentation

See http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-disk-utility/tree/src/gdu/gdu-ssh-bridge.c#n41 for a description of the technical details of the remote access protocol.

Release Notes

The udisks storage daemon supports LVM and multipath devices in Fedora 13. The palimpsest tool provides a graphical user interface to these features. It has also seen several other user interface improvements, and optionally allows remote access now.


Comments and Discussion