yast2-storage-ng is a reimplementation of the YaST storage module (yast2-storage) based on the also reimplemented library for storage manager (libstorage-ng).

When finished, this module will contain essentially two parts:

• Storage Proposal: Based on the existing storage setup of a system proposes a storage layout for a new installation. Useful in two cases:

  • During a normal installation, offering a user interface to influence and inspect the result before it's written to the disks.
  • During auto-installation honoring the partitioning section of the AutoYaST profile.

• Code for the YaST installation workflow and support functions for other YaST modules (such as the Partitioner, see below), organized into the Y2Storage Ruby namespace. That includes:

  • A thin wrapper on top of several of the classes provided by the libstorage-ng Ruby bindings, like Devicegraph, Disk, etc. Check the libstorage-ng documentation for information about the philosophy and general usage and check the documentation of the Y2Storage namespace for details about the wrapper classes.
  • Additional YaST-specific functionality.

In this moment, the module also includes a simple prototype of a possible reimplementation of the YaST Expert Partitioner, a powerful tool capable of actions such as creating partitions and filesystems or configuring LVM and software RAID. That prototype will be removed in the near future in favor of this separate YaST module, built on top of the functionality provided by this package.

This module is entirely unsupported.

If you are brave enough to install this module in a (open)SUSE system, despite the facts that is not supported and can produce data loss, you can perform the following steps (as root):

# Repository for Tumbleweed/Factory, adjust this line if using other distribution
zypper ar -f http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/YaST:/storage-ng/openSUSE_Tumbleweed/ libstorage-ng
zypper ref
rpm -e --nodeps libstorage7 libstorage-ruby libstorage-python libstorage-devel libstorage-testsuite
# There might be reported file conflicts between yast2-storage-ng and yast2-storage,
# it should be OK to ignore them.
zypper in yast2-storage-ng

There are test ISO images available in the build service that can be used to perform an openSUSE Tumbleweed installation using this module instead of the original yast2-storage. Once again, take into account this is not supported and can produce data loss.

The installation process is the same than a regular openSUSE system. The following things must be taken into account:

• Not all scenarios work at this point in time (see Status below).
• Some user interfaces can be slightly different.
• As with a regular Tumbleweed, for the partitioning proposal to work the hard disk must be big enough to accommodate all the requested partitions. Using Btrfs for the root partition and a separate partition for /home, the hard disk requirements can grow up to 25GiB at the time of writing (slightly more than the regular openSUSE Tumbleweed).
• The ISO image includes a relatively small selection of software, so choosing Gnome or KDE Plasma in the "computer role" screen may not work as expected.

Check the status of already implemented and still missing functionality.