Time flies and it has been already two weeks since our previous development report. On these special days, we keep being the YaST + Cockpit Team and we have news on both fronts. So let’s do a quick recap.

Cockpit Modules

Our Cockpit module to manage wicked keeps improving. Apart from several small enhancements, the module has now better error reporting and correctly manages those asynchronous operations that wicked takes some time to perform. In addition, we have improved the integration with a default Cockpit installation, ensuring the new module replaces the default network one (which relies on Network Manager) if both are installed. In the following days we will release RPM packages and a separate blog post to definitely present Cockpit Wicked to the world.

On the other hand, we also have news about our Cockpit module to manage transactional updates. We are creating some early functional prototypes of the user interface to be used as a base for future development and discussions. You can check the details and several screenshots at the following pull requests: request#3, request#5.

Btrfs Subvolumes in the Partitioner

Regarding YaST and as already mentioned in our previous blog post, we are working to ensure Btrfs subvolumes get the attention they deserve in the user interface of the YaST Partitioner, becoming first class citizens (like partitions or LVM logical volumes) instead of an obscure feature hidden in the screen for editing a file system.

As part of that effort, we improved the existing mechanism to suggest a given list of subvolumes, based on the selected product and system role. See more details and screenshots at the corresponding pull request.

We also added some support for Btrfs quotas, a mechanism that can be used to improve space accounting and to ensure a given subvolume (eg. /var or /tmp) does not grow too much and ends up filling up all the space in the root file system. This pull request explains the new feature with several screenshots, including the new quite informative help texts.

All the mentioned changes related to subvolumes management will be submitted to openSUSE Tumbleweed in the following days.

More YaST enhancements

Talking about the YaST Partitioner, you may know that we recently added a menu bar to its interface. During this sprint we improved the YaST UI toolkit to ensure the keyboard shortcuts for such menu bar stay as stable as possible. Check the details at this pull request.

We have also been working in making the installer more flexible by adding support to define, per product and per system role, whether YaST should propose to configure the system for hibernation. In the case of SUSE Linux Enterprise, we have adapted the control file to propose hibernation in the SLED case, but not for other members of the SLE family.

See you soon

Of course, we have done much more during the latest two weeks. But we assume you don’t want to read about small changes and boring bug-fixes… and we are looking forward to jump into the next sprint. So let’s go back to work and see you in two weeks!