Red Hat Developers Introduce New Tool For Linux Storage Management

The lid has been lifted on blivet-gui, a new open-source storage tool designed by Red Hat for configuring disks and file-systems.

Red Hat decided to develop a new GUI-driven utility for storage management on Fedora/RHEL as GParted, one of the popular programs for disk management on Linux, doesn't support all of the technologies found in modern Linux distributions. The utility is named blivet-gui as it uses the Blivet Python library used for storage configuration. Red Hat's Anaconda installer is already using Blivet for its storage configuration during installation so this new tool should integrate well with their stack.

The GUI is written using GTK3 but the developers are open to seeing a text mode for the utility and other features added. While not based on GParted, the developers user-interface layout is inspired by GParted to try to avoid confusion or having to learn a new UI for disk management. The GUI is also embeddable using the XEmbed protocol support should anyone want to integrate it into another application regardless of toolkit.

The Red Hat developers also didn't base their work on the GNOME Disks application since it doesn't support advanced features like LVM and RAID with GNOME Disks having more of a "simple" focus.

The tool remains under heavy development with among other features expected in the next few months for blivet-gui are RAID and Btrfs features being exposed. More details on this tool announced today can be found via the Fedora mailing list.