Gnome Storage Manager

Preview

  • Actually we have diverse tools to deal with partitioning, resizing and formating, but the platform lacks a general tool to address this tasks. Current tools I have in mind:

    • Gparted: Cool tool based on libparted. It is a front-end to parted, made to simplify disk resizing tasks. It is programmed using C++ and gtkmm.

    • GnomeSystemTools: Disk management tool. This was an initial effort to bring up a partitioning tool.

    • Partimage: Curses client-server program designed to backup entire partitions and store them on a file. It is similar in functionality to Ghost or the dmg image functionality of MacOs X. It is appropriate for distributing compressed disk images.

    • EVMS: IBM EVMS is an alternative volume managing system with several interfaces. It is too complex and unintuitive. For professional use.

Technologies involved

  • We have a storage detection backend. I plan to use hal to deal with storage detection. Other technologies like DBus may be appropriate for inter process communication were required.
  • Support for software RAID volumes. Actually RAID configuration is done by hand or with distro-based tools. We should be able to provide this functionality for the standard GNOME desktop.
  • Support for LVM volumes: LVM volumes simplify large storage management. It should be easy to read this volumes once detected.
  • Support for imaging and compression. We can use an advanced compression algorithm to achieve better compression ratios than partimage. Maybe we can use a squashed filesystem to obtain a compressed image that we can simply mount as a loop device, or improve the code on partimage library to use another more advanced compression algorithm.
  • Resizing support via parted/libparted.
  • Client-Server architecture to permit multicast partition cloning and remote operation.

Planning for development

  • Phase 1: Partimage resurrection: I will start to revive partimage software and split it in 2 layers:
    • - Libpartimage: Written in C++, as the original, it will be a little library that other projects could easily
      • reuse. Maybe it could be hosted in freedesktop.
      - GPartimage: It will be a GTK+ user interface that we could use to test the application.
    • Date of Starting: March 2006.
  • Phase 2: We will work on gnome-system-tools disk admin component to integrate libpartimage and gparted there.
  • Phase 3: Start using hal for disk detection. Add RAID detection and LVM detection.
  • Phase 4: Redesign GUI

Attic/GnomeStorageManager (last edited 2013-11-26 20:31:41 by WilliamJonMcCann)