Wiki » Feature:DiskDrakeRedesign

Summary

Diskdrake slight redesign to have a unified partitioner/mountpoint changer/installer locations. To also allow network locations to appear next to all the disks. ie: NFS/iSCSI/AoE/drbd/...

Owner

• Name: AL13N
• Email: alien@rmail.be

Resources

• Diskdrake developers
• Installer developers
• AL13N can test and spend a small bit of time on this

Current status

• Targeted release: Mageia 3/Mageia 4
• Last updated: 2025/05/26
• Percentage of completion: 0%

Detailed Description

Basic mode needs the following:

• Rescan button: to allow to rescan for partitions/disks
• if there is no partition media, don't abort, but show the message instead of the disks (because people can click on rescan or on advanced)
• installer or readonly media should be shown as well (to allow setting mount points)

Advanced mode needs the following:

• a sort of wizard to add network-based media (iSCSI, NFS, AoE, drbd, ...)
• these other (networkbased) media, could be shown as tabs (just like disks)
• allow installation on NFS, If time allows (or this is for mageia4)

With an NFS install, i mean the following example:

• imagine a network PXE installer
• imaging a diskless system
• imaging booting from PXE to start mageia installer (ON the diskless system)
• in advanced mode in diskdrake installer: adding NFS server and selecting a directory
• that directory appears now in a tab
• select as mount point /
• instead of formatting, delete all files in that directory (if there are any)
• then the diskless system can boot from PXE+NFS

Why it would be good for Mageia to include it

• allows to have a single app(installer step) to have all mount points/partitioning/formatting.
• allows to use network-based storage to install to (iSCSI, NFS, AoE, drbd, etc...)
• have also future possibilities of installer, like installing on an NFS share.

Software / Packages Dependencies

• diskdrake
• installer

What could disrupt development of this new feature

work needed to complete this (documentation, keeping automatic installations working)

Planning

mga3

1. Remove the abort if no disks are found and show the error text in the next screen instead of disks.
2. Implement the rescan button, which can rescan after you've put in USB disks, or hotplug disks etc...
3. Show all storage devices found (grey out the readonly ones)
4. check if you can set moint points for everything
5. In advanced mode, make a wizard to add manually network-based storage
6. test with iSCSI, NFS, drbd, AoE

mga4 (or if enough time also mga3)

1. If enough time allows, try to use this to test with an NFS install.

Contingency

If it doens't work as advertised, we can revert back to old diskdrake.