RFC: Blivet & mounting

Jan Safranek jsafrane at redhat.com
Thu Jan 31 14:57:40 UTC 2013


Hello,

OpenLMI project uses Blivet, former Anaconda storage library, to manage
storage. Management of storage also means management of mounts, i.e.
ability to mount/unmount/remount stuff, list existing mounts and
add/delete/modify/list entries in /etc/fstab.

The installer somehow manipulates fstab and mounts stuff and there is
some code in Blivet for that, but I am not sure it can be easily
extended for generic use case.

Is generic mounting/unmounting capability that something Blivet should
do, so it would be integrated there, or there should be separate library
for this? In both cases, we (=OpenLMI) would /probably/ provide the code.

Is there any other potential Blivet user who needs mounting? Can the
installer benefit from more generic mounting?

What OpenLMI needs:
- parse /proc/mounts and provide list of mounts with their options
- parse /etc/fstab and provide list of persistent mounts with their
options (which can be different to /proc/mounts, someone might re-mount
something with different options!)
- re-mount a mount with different options
- create new mount, both permanent (with fstab entry) and 'temporary'
- unmount anything (incl. removing entry from fstab).

BTW, for fstab manipulation I am thinking about augeas-python. It does
not pull any big dependency except libxml2, still it's yet another
package needed in installer ramdisk if generic mounting is in Blivet.

Jan


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