Hi,
believe it or not, the YaST team wants to improve the usability
of the storage UI by using wizards. These wizards should make
complex or unfamiliar tasks easier for the user.
The question now at hand is: What tasks should be made easier? On
one hand we can likely not add dozens of wizards, on the other
hand many user should benefit from them.
So far we had a look at the SUSE manuals and one task explained
there that is extremely tedious since it involves many steps is
the creation of RAIDs using partitions. Usually the user first
has to create the individual partitions and then finally the
RAIDs. Suppose the user wants 4 RAIDs with 3 partitions each,
that sums up to 12 partitions. Furthermore the user has to know
in advance how big the partitions have to be to get RAIDs of the
desired sizes.
A wizard should ask for the disks instead of the partitions and
then create the partitions for the user. Also the user can either
provide the size of the partitions, the size of the RAID or
simply the maximal-possible-size.
The idea can be taken one step further by introducing storage
pools, a bit like ZFS, LVM and btrfs do. E.g. on a regular
machine there might be two pools, one with all HDDs and one with
all SSDs. When creating a RAID the user simply selects the pool
and the number of devices instead of the individual disks. YaST
would then find the best suitable disks of the pool to create the
RAID.
But maybe not many people create RAIDs in the first place, so
what wizards could the YaST storage UI, both the expert
partitioner as well as the storage proposal during installation,
provide to help as many users as possible? We pay attention even
to the most crazy ideas.
Thanks in advance,
Arvin
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Arvin Schnell,