[opensuse-factory] Improvements to YaST Storage UI - Early Feedback wanted
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 -- Arvin Schnell, <aschnell@suse.com> Senior Software Engineer, Research & Development SUSE Software Solutions Germany GmbH Maxfeldstraße 5 90409 Nürnberg Germany (HRB 36809, AG Nürnberg) Geschäftsführer: Felix Imendörffer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
On 6/22/20 12:54 PM, Arvin Schnell wrote:
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.
Hi, I recently established 3 different RAID arrays on 4 disks with 4 partitions each using the primitive tools. A wizard that could do this from bare metal would really have been appreciated even though I learned a lot. The main problem was that much of the on-line descriptions assume that each disk in the array will have only a single partition, which is not realistic in the era of multi-TB drives. Good luck with the activity, Larry -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
On 2020-06-22 02:34 PM, Larry Finger wrote:
I recently established 3 different RAID arrays on 4 disks with 4 partitions each using the primitive tools. A wizard that could do this from bare metal would really have been appreciated even though I learned a lot. The main problem was that much of the on-line descriptions assume that each disk in the array will have only a single partition, which is not realistic in the era of multi-TB drives.
A few years ago, when I set up some RAID systems, I created the array using the entire drive and then partitioned it with LVM. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
On 6/22/20 7:54 PM, Arvin Schnell wrote:
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.
Something I would like to see (and I'm sure I'm not the only one) is some way to use part of the capabilities of the Guided Setup without needing to run the whole thing and/or without running it always with the current disk layout as starting point. Right now, the Guided Setup is offered as an alternative to the Expert Partitioner, but I believe there is a lot of value in offering it (or even some specific parts of it) WITHIN the Partitioner, in addition to the current status. For example, let's say I enter the Expert Partitioner and free some space manually exactly as I want. For example, resizing a Windows partition to the specific size I want it to have and deleting a particular previous Linux partition. And then from that point, I would like to run the Guided Setup, so it creates my openSUSE installation in the space I have just freed. I could even decide that I want to mount a concrete partition for swap and/or create a specific partition for /var and only then run the Guided Setup from within the Partitioner for it to complete the picture in the space I left unused (creating the boot-related partitions, the root one and whatever is defined by the system role). A kind of related feedback I get often is that people would like to use only one specific part of the Guided Proposal - the one that determines the partitions needed for booting (like the /boot/efi or the BIOS Boot one). Again, you could enter the Expert Partitioner, make some space if needed and then click on some "Propose boot-related partitions" kind of wizard. After some questions (like which is the boot disk and whether the user wants to use any LVM/RAID/whatever), YaST would add those partitions in the Expert Partitioner and the user could continue from there defining the rest of the system. I have been told also that people would like to fine-tune the sizes of the partitions created by the proposal. Let's say I choose btrfs root and a separate /home. The Guided Setup now distributes the disk space between those two based on some rules defined by the system role chosen by the user. But some users would like to give more space to root (because they use snapshots intensively) and less to /home. Or maybe the other way around. Even without considering its integration into the Expert Partitioner, there are quite some things that could be improved in the Guided Setup itself... but I feel that's a different topic. Cheers. -- Ancor González Sosa YaST Team at SUSE Software Solutions -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org
participants (4)
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Ancor Gonzalez Sosa -
Arvin Schnell -
James Knott -
Larry Finger