Libstorage-NG Landing Soon In openSUSE Tumbleweed For Improving The Installer

Users of the openSUSE rolling-release Linux distribution will soon find an improved installer thanks to Libstorage-NG landing soon and improvements to YaST.

Libstorage is a low-level storage library used by SUSE's YaST for dealing with disk / partition / LVM management and other storage device interaction. For over the past two years, libstorage-ng has been in development as the next-generation implementation.

Libstorage-NG is better engineered than the original libstorage and will allow for a lot of new functionality that couldn't be achieved with their old library. Among the functionality coming to Libstorage-NG that can be piped through to YaST and openSUSE's installation component are aplenty.

Btrfs multi-device support, BCache SSD/HDD caching, DM-Cache, and better encryption support are among the near-term improvements users of openSUSE Tumbleweed will be able to enjoy on installation. Further out there is plans around bettering support for SMR host-managed drives, OpenChannel SSDs (LightNVM), better NVMe support, and other advanced disk features.

For those openSUSE users wanting to find out more regarding Libstorage-NG and the rewritten components coming to YaST, there is a lengthy post up at news.opensuse.org. The libstorage-ng library has been under development with this GitHub repository.