We know we owe you a report for the previous development sprint (namely the 71th). But we also know how to compensate that. This week we have not only one, but up to three blog posts to keep you tuned to the YaST evolution.

So let’s start with the summary of what have been implemented and fixed lately. That includes

• Improvements in the Bcache support in the Partitioner
• Users home as Btrfs subvolumes
• Better visualization of Salt formulas in YaST Configuration Management
• Automatic selection of the needed driver packages
• Improvements in many other areas like AutoYaST, bootloader, the Partitioner and the storage Guided Setup

You will find links to the other more exhaustive blog posts, about the recently added Bcache support and the revamped Configuration Management module, in the corresponding sections of this report.

Final Improvements in the Bcache Support

During several sprints, we have been detailing our efforts to offer a decent support for the Bcache technology in the YaST partitioner. During this sprint we have implemented what we consider the three final bits:

• Bache devices without caching
• Modifying Bcache devices
• Listing all caching sets

We will now detail this three improvements. But to celebrate that Bcache support looks complete now in the Partitioner, we have published a separate blog post explaining what Bcache is and how to take advantage of that technology using the YaST Partitioner. Enjoy!

And back to the topic of recent improvements, we should mention that the Bcache technology allows to create a Bcache device without an associated caching one. This is useful if you are considering to use Bcache in the future. In that case you can setup all your slow devices as Bcache backing devices without a cache, leaving open the possibility of adding caching devices later. That is now possible by selecting the new option labeled “without caching” during creation, as shown in the following screenshot.

Of course, that’s not much useful without the possibility of modifying a Bcache device. So in the latest sprints we also added a new “Change Caching” button.

This option will only work for bcaches that do not exist in your system yet (e.g., a bcache that you are creating right now). For existing bcache devices, this option is only available when the bcache has no associated caching device yet. Otherwise, a detaching action would be required, and that could take very long time in some situations.

And last but not least (regarding Bcache), now the Expert Partitioner also shows the list of all caching sets in a separate tab (unsurprisingly) titled “Caching Set Devices”. It is only an informative tab, but thanks to it you will be able to check all devices currently used for caching at a quick glance.

Create the User’s Home as a Btrfs Subvolume

As many (open)SUSE users know, Btrfs offers several advantages over traditional Linux file-systems. One of them is the possibility of using subvolumes to customize the configuration and features of different parts of the same file-system.

From now on, the YaST Users module allows to create the home path of new users as a subvolume instead of a plain directory, as long as a Btrfs file-system could be found in the system, of course. As simple as checking the “Create as Btrfs Subvolume” option that you will find just below the “Home Directory” field.

In a multi-user system, using Btrfs subvolumes for the home paths of the users can open a world of possibilities. The system administrator can decide to give some users the ability to create snapshots of their corresponding home directories, even automated on every login and/or logout using PAM Snapper. Similar ideas can be applied to a Samba deployment. Moreover, using subvolumes as homes can also be useful to implement per user quotas.

Beyond multi-user systems, fine-tuning the mount options or customizing snapshots and quotas can also be useful for some special system users (e.g. the user associated to a database system).

And all that, as always in YaST, equally easy to configure with the graphical interface and with the text-based one.

Better Visualization of SUSE Manager Salt Formulas

As we announced on January, we have been working on updating the SUSE Manager Salt Formulas support in YaST Configuration Management to comply with the latest forms specification. As it happens with the Bcache support, we feel we have reached a point in which the feature is polished enough to be shipped in the next (open)SUSE stable releases and to deserve its own separate blog post. So go and enjoy our third blog post of this week, a sneak peak into the marriage of SUSE Manager and YaST, thanks to the magic of Salt Formulas.

In that regard, we have been recently improving how the forms look like to make them as easy to use as possible. Bear in mind that a form can be quite long and the support for scrolling in YaST2 is quite limited. In order to workaround this problem, YaST2 will display a tree at the left side outlining the structure of the form.

Apart from that, we have solved some known problems, like exporting date/time and numeric values in a correct way or handling missing and default values properly.

Sure there are some details that we like to improve but, for now, what we need is feedback from you. So, if you are interested in such a functionality, please check the mentioned dedicated blog post about the topic and have a look to yast2-configuration-management 4.1.5.

Automatically Selecting the Driver Packages in Installed System

In openSUSE Leap 15.0 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, the packages containing drivers needed by the system are installed automatically if they are available during the installation. However, if a repository with driver packages is added later in the installed system then the drivers are not automatically selected to install.

Fortunately, in Leap 15.1 and SLE-15-SP1 the package solver implements a new solver mode in which it selects for installation only the recommended driver packages, without also dragging other non-driver recommended packages into the system.

For example, after adding the nVidia driver repository in Leap 15.1 (YaST ➝ Software Repositories ➝ Add ➝ Community Repositories, select “nVidia Graphics Drivers”) and starting the package manager (YaST ➝ Software Management), the respective nVidia driver packages are automatically selected to install if there is a supported nVidia graphics card present in the system. This of course works also for the other driver packages and hardware devices.

Just a last note about automatic selection of recommended driver packages. When running the package manager for the first time in a recently installed openSUSE Leap 15.1, it might automatically select some additional packages to install coming from the Leap OSS on-line repository (which is added automatically the end of the installation). Do not be surprised, that’s actually desired. If you do not want to install those packages simply deselect them, YaST will remember that and it will not select them next time.

See more details in the corresponding documentation.

Improved Disk Selection Screen in the Storage Guided Setup

Although it may sound surprising for some users, it’s not uncommon to install SUSE Linux Enterprise on systems with dozens or even hundreds of disks. Of course, in those advanced scenarios the automatic partitioning proposal is not much useful and users are expected to use the Expert Partitioner. But, what if someone tries to use the partitioning Guided Setup in a system with 30 disks? In SLE-15 (or Leap 15.0, in the case of this concrete screenshot) they will see a screen as unusable as this.

Of course, it only gets worse if the number of disks increases or if the text-mode interface is used. So we improved the disk selection screen, taking also the opportunity to include additional information to make easier to identify removable devices like USB and IEEE 1394 ones. In future releases, the screen will normally look pretty much as it looks in the previous version, just with the extra information about USB.

But if the system contains more than 10 disks to choose from, then a different widget that makes scrolling possible will be used, ensuring the user interface remains usable enough in both graphical and text-based modes.

YaST Bootloader Becomes Less Whinny

When the installation of the system is spread over multiple physical disks, YaST Bootloader always tries to setup the bootloader in all those disks. This helps for example when MD RAID is used to achieve redundancy and some disk fails. Then the system can still boot from any of the other disks, since they also contain a proper bootloader.

But in some cases the installation can be spread over multiple disks but with only one of them being prepared to host the bootloader (e.g. containing the needed partitions). YaST bootloader used to complain about it while generating its proposal, which resulted in an error shown during installation.

In this sprint we have relaxed the YaST Bootloader expectations a bit. It still tries to create a fail-over setup, but the proposal does not complain if at least one disk looks bootable. Additionally if Grub2 is properly installed to at least one device, then possible failures in other disks will not result in an error pop-up, but just logged for future reference.

Device Order for MD RAIDs in AutoYaST

During the development of storage-ng, the feature to specify the device order for MD RAIDs with AutoYaST was lost. The feature can be useful for RAID level 10 to ensure that one full half of the RAID will only reside on one disk subsystem and the other half on the other subsystem. Only then a complete failure of a single subsystem keeps the RAID working.

Now the feature has been re-implemented for Leap 15.1 and SLE-15-SP1 and the “device_order” tag of the AutoYaST profile works as expected. For further information about configuring RAID with AutoYaST, consult the AutoYaST documentation.

Improvements in the Partitioner

That AutoYaST feature was not the only thing that temporarily disappeared with the replacement of the old storage components by storage-ng. The “Provide Crypt Passwords” button in the Partitioner was also not there in the early versions included in openSUSE Leap 15.0. But it was not really an omission, but a consequence on how the activation of logical devices works now in YaST.

During installation, all pre-existing logical devices that need some initialization are always activated to make possible to use them. That includes LVM, Multipath devices (for which a user confirmation is requested) and encrypted devices (for which the password is asked to the user). But triggering such activations in an already installed and running system cannot be done so lightly, since it affects the execution of the whole system.

Still, there are cases in which a user executing the YaST Partitioner in an already installed system may desire to activate currently inactive devices. To allow that we brought back the “Provide Crypt Passwords” button, but with two small changes compared to its historical behavior.

• It activates all kind of devices, not only the crypt ones.
• It refreshes all the Partitioner information, reading again the status of all the storage devices.

Of course, any change in behavior is a nice opportunity to revisit and expand the help texts.

Another change that was intentionally introduced in the first versions of the rewritten Partitioner was the fact that new file-systems always got an empty label by default, independently of the previous content of the partition being formatted.

But the old Partitioner used to do things differently when reformatting a partition. In that case, it actually copied the label of the previous file-system into the new one. Some users told us (via bug reports) they wanted the old behavior back, so now the Partitioner preserves the old label when a partition is reformatted.

Wow, that was a lot!

As usual, this report only covers a small portion of what the YaST Team has been doing. But definitely this time our readers will have enough material to keep themselves entertained for quite some time. Specially combining this with the two already mentioned monographic posts about the Bcache support and about the compatibility with SUSE Manager Salt Formulas.

Have a lot of fun reading!

We have to admit that lately we have not been exactly regular and reliable in delivering our blog posts. But with the vacation season coming to an end, we are determined to recover the good pace. Since the proof is in the pudding, here is our latest report, just one week after the previous one.

Improving the user experience in the Services Manager

And talking about the previous report, we presented there several improvements in the YaST Services Manager module, including the new “Apply” and “Show Log” buttons. With the “Apply” button, all changes performed over the services are applied without closing the Services Manager, which allows you to continue using it and to inspect the logs of a service without relaunching the Services Manager again. But this new “Apply” button only makes sense when there is something to save, so during this sprint we have improved the UI to disable the button when nothing has been changed yet. In addition, now it is easier to know what we have edited so far in the Services Manager. For every change over a service, the new value is explicitly highlighted by using the special mark (*). For example, when you change the start mode of a service from “On boot” to “On demand”, you will see “(*) On Demand” in the corresponding column, see example.

The list of services and the changes performed on them can be quite long. So in addition to the new mark, now a confirmation popup is shown up when using the “Apply” or “OK” button. This popup will present a summary with all changes that will be applied, that is, what services will be started or stopped, what services will change its start mode to “on boot”, “on demand” or “manually”, and even which will be the new default Systemd Target in case you have modified it. See an example in the following screenshot.

These improvements will reach openSUSE Tumbleweed soon and will be available in the upcoming versions of SLE (SLE-15-SP1) and openSUSE Leap (15.1).

Yast2 Systemd classes reorganized

Related to the changes in the Service Manager and in a more developer-oriented note. Yast2 Systemd (the set of YaST components that handle Systemd units under the hood) also has been completely reorganized in a more Ruby compliant way. Moving from YCP-style modules to a set of classes that behave like nice citizens of the Ruby ecosystem in their own proper namespace.

AutoYaST support for Xen virtual partitions

And to continue with refinements over the features introduced in the previous sprint, we have also improved the support for the so-called Xen virtual partitions that we presented in our previous post. As explained there, the old storage stack used to represent the Xen devices like /dev/xvda1 as partitions of a non-existing /dev/xvda hard disk. In the new stack, those devices are treated as they deserve, as independent block devices on themselves with no made-up disks coming from nowhere.

But AutoYaST profiles from a SLE-12 or Leap 42.x still pretend there are hard disks grouping the Xen virtual partitions. So in addition to the fixes introduced in the Partitioner during the previous sprint, we also had to teach the new storage stack how to handle fanciful AutoYaST <drive> sections like this, used to describe groups of Xen devices (xvda1 and xvda2 really exist in the system, xvda doesn’t).

 <drive>
    <device>/dev/xvda</device>

    <partition>
      <partition_nr>1</partition_nr>
      ...information about /dev/xvda1...
    </partition>

    <partition>
      <partition_nr>2</partition_nr>
      ...information about /dev/xvda2...
    </partition>

  </drive>
</pre>

The fix will be released as an installer self-update patch so users installing SLE-15 (with access to a self-update repository) can take advantage of it. In the mid term we will have to come up with a more realistic format to represent such devices in the AutoYaST profiles, but so far the limitations of the current AutoYaST format enforces us to keep the current approach.

Ignoring inactive RAID arrays

But that’s not the only new skill of Storage-ng for this sprint. It also learned how to better manage inactive RAID arrays. MD RAID arrays are built to handle failures of the underlying physical devices. When some of the devices fail, the RAID becomes “degraded” which means the data is still accessible but it’s time to fix things. When too many devices suffer a fault, the RAID becomes inactive and it cannot operate any longer until it’s repaired. Our Partitioner was not handling this situation well, popping up a generic “unexpected situation” error message.

We have fixed that, and the storage stack doesn’t go nuts any longer if an inactive RAID array is found. Even more, it now shows an “Active: Yes/No” field under the RAID heading to inform the user in case the RAID is in such bad shape.

All that will be soon available as a maintenance update for SLE-15 and Leap 15.0. So far, no mechanisms have been introduced to stop the user from modifying an inactive RAID array with the Partitioner. That will come in the future, together with other MD RAID improvements in Storage-ng targeting future releases of SLE and openSUSE Leap.

Media support in the Installation Server module

It’s quite embarrassing but it turned out that the Installation Server YaST module in SLE15 and openSUSE Leap 15.0 is not able to add the SLE15/Leap15 installation media. The reason is that the new media use a different repository format and the Installation Server module crashed when trying to add a new repository.

Fortunately the fix was small and allows adding the new media correctly. We plan to release a maintenance update for SLE15, openSUSE Leap 15.0 and SLE12-SP3. It turned out that the code in SLE11-SP4 is more robust and does not crash so we do not need an update there.

Improved help text for system roles

We recently got a bug report about how hard was to read the help text in the installation screen explaining the system roles. So we took it as an opportunity to try how flexible our help text system is. Adding some richtext format made it look much better in graphical mode and also surprisingly well text mode. Let’s see some screenshots from Leap 15.0, although the fix applies to as well to openSUSE Tumbleweed and the SLE15 family.

This is how it looked before the fix.

And that how it looks now, in both Qt and Ncurses, with the new format.

Fixed PHP support in the YaST HTTP server module

The YaST HTTP server module allows enabling the PHP support in the Apache web server configuration. However, as the module is not actively developed it turned out that the PHP support was broken. YaST wanted to install the apache2-mod_php5 package which is not available in openSUSE Leap 15.0 or SLE15, there is a newer apache2-mod_php7 package.

After checking the other required packages it turned out that a similar problem exists for some other Apache modules. To avoid this issue in the future again we have added an additional test which checks the availability of all potentially installed packages. If there is a new version or a package is dropped we should be notified earlier by continuous integration instead of an user bug report later.

Stay tuned

Of course, in addition to the mentioned highlights we have fixed several small and medium bugs. And we plan to continue improving YaST in many ways… and to keep you punctually updated. So don’t go too far away.

Five weeks without blogging is certainly a quite an hiatus for the YaST Team. But fear no more, we are back! This is the first time in quite a while in which our post is not titled “Highlights of YaST Development Sprint” and there are good reasons for that.

Adapting the YaST Team Structure the Agile Way

Now that openSUSE Leap 15.0 is out and SUSE Enterprise Linux 15 is ready to be shipped, we felt it was time to rethink our activities. For the duration of the storage-ng development, we had split the YaST team into two sub-teams: Team S for Storage and Team R for the Rest. But now new challenges await us; there are some things that were pushed aside because getting storage-ng into an acceptable state had top priority.

We decided we’d try an approach that other development teams in SUSE have already been using successfully: split up the YaST team into “squads” of 3-5 people each for the duration of a couple of sprints. Each squad is centered around a big topic that needs to be addressed. There is no long-term fixed assignment of anyone to any squad; the idea is to shuffle people and thus know-how around as needed, of course taking each developer’s interests into account. So the squads and the topics will change every few weeks.

Is this the pure spirit of Scrum and the agile bible? We don’t know. And we don’t care. The agile spirit is to adapt your work based on what makes sense in every moment. We work the agile way, so the way of working also has to be agile.

The next sprint’s report will contain more information about the first set of squads and the results they are delivering. But meanwhile we have done much more than just reorganizing our forces. While the sprint-based work was suspended (thus the blog title not containing the word “sprint”), the YaST team still managed to put out of the door quite some features, improvements and bug fixes targeting mainly Tumbleweed.

Expert Partitioner: Moving Partitions

After quite some effort, the YaST team has completely rewritten the Expert Partitioner from scratch using the new storage stack (a.k.a. storage-ng). And although this new Expert Partitioner already offers practically all the same features than the old one, some last options are still coming. One them in the button for moving partitions, which saves us of a lot unnecessary work in many cases. For example, imagine you are installing openSUSE Tumbleweed and the installer automatically proposes you to create a partition for root and, just following it, a second partition for home. In case you don’t like the default proposed sizes (e.g. because you want a bigger root), you have to use the Expert Partitioner to fix the situation. You have to completely remove the home partition, resize root for enlarging it and then create home again with the same options than before.

Now, with the “Move” button, this kind of modifications are much easier. For that example, you can accomplish exactly the same by simply resizing home (without deleting it completely) and moving the resized home closer to the end of the disk (by using Move button). After moving the home partition, you have enough free space for enlarging the root partition. In the following screenshot you can see this dialog for moving partitions.

One important thing to take into account is that the movement of partitions is only possible for new partitions, that is, it is not possible to move partitions that already exist on disk.

YaST Masking Systemd Mount and Swap Units

And speaking about the Partitioner and its relationship with the rest of the system, the transition from SysVinit to Systemd changed the behavior of (open)SUSE concerning mounting devices. Systemd generates mount units for various file systems, e.g. those listed in /etc/fstab. The result is that Systemd may automatically mount any file system, even if that file system has been manually unmounted before. This can be problematic when the user needs the file system to be unmounted for certain operations, like resizing or unplugging.

Thus, now the Partitioner uses a new mechanism to prevent that to happen during its execution. Starting with version 4.0.194, the yast2-storage-ng package includes and uses the script /usr/lib/YaST2/bin/mask-systemd-units to mask all mount and swap units one by one. The script might also be useful for direct use of system administrators. So… profit!

Showing Logs the Systemd Way

And since we speak about how Systemd has changed the way the overall system works, it’s also worth noticing how more and more services has been adopting the Systemd journal for its logging purposes.

Some of the existing YaST modules to configure a given service include a button to show the logs of such service. In the past, they used to display the content of /var/log/messages with some basic filtering to ensure only the information relative to the service (e.g. tftp) was shown. But that didn’t work out of the box for services already using the Systemd journal, and we had gotten quite some bug reports about it.

Fortunately, the solution is really at our fingertips. You surely know by now that there is a YaST module for viewing the journal content with powerful queries for filtering, searching and so so on. The obvious solution is to use that YaST journal module also within other YaST modules, in order to show domain specific logs.

So far we adapted the YaST tftp module, but it will be easy to fix also other places that use the old approach that no longer works. And this is how it looks when you click the “Show Logs” button in the YaST module to configure tftp.

Usability Improvement in the Repositories Manager

The YaST repositories manager displays the repositories sorted by priority. But some people have a lot of repositories in their system and make no use of the priorities. Since there was not a clear second criteria, the order of the repository list looked quite arbitrary in those cases. Now all the repositories with the same priority are sorted by name, which makes more sense. See how it looked before the improvement.

And compare to how it looks now.

Handling Inconsistent Boot Methods During Upgrade

We got a rather interesting amount of bug reports for openSUSE Leap 15.0 about collisions between the grub2 and grub2-efi bootloaders during the upgrade process. The root cause was that the installation medium used a different booting mode than the installed system being upgraded. For example, the installed system uses EFI boot but the upgrade is executed from a DVD booted via legacy mode (i.e. disabling EFI). In that case, the kernel running from the DVD does not expose some devices that are needed to write to the EFI boot manager. Moreover, it causes troubles to the updater itself, which does not expect this situation.

Looking at the majority of the bug reports, it is obvious that in most cases it happens by accident rather than the user consciously trying to mix both boot modes. So to improve the user experience we added a warning that will be displayed when this situation is detected, before starting the upgrade. That gives the user the possibility to fix the problem or to continue if the situation is really intentional.

Below you can see how it looks, both in graphical and text mode, in a patched openSUSE Leap 15.0 installation media, since the feature was developed too late to be included in the official installation images.

What’s Next? Hack Week!

As commented at the beginning of the post, we have restarted the sprint-based work, although with a little twist to try out the squads approach. But before we come back to you to show the results of the first squad-based sprint, we have something else to do – Hack Week 17!.

Again it’s the time of the year for all SUSE Engineers (and any Open Source enthusiast willing to join) to innovate and learn new stuff. So please forgive us if we go too deep into playing and we are less responsive next week. See you again soon!

As the release dates for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 and openSUSE Leap 15 approach, we keep adapting YaST to make easier for our users to take advantage of all the new features that these rock-solid operating systems will bring.

During the last two weeks that has implied, apart from regular bug fixing that we usually don’t cover here, working on AutoYaST, improving Storage-ng and polishing several aspects related to modules and extensions, like their registration and licenses.

Let’s start with the rewritten Partitioner that is part of yast2-storage-ng.

Partitioner: more flexibility with the partition id

Setting the right partition id (also known as partition type) for each partition is an important part of the system setup that is often overlooked. Our Partitioner has always displayed in a prominent place the widget allowing to set that id, suggesting always the best value based on the selected role and the chosen file system type. But in many cases, that was more than a simple suggestion. In the old Partitioner (and in the new one until this sprint) the value of the partition id field (Linux, swap, Linux LVM, etc.) could only be manually edited in case the user had selected to not format the partition. When the option “Format device” was selected, the automatically chosen value could not be changed.

In SLE15 and openSUSE Leap 15 (and quite soon in openSUSE Tumbleweed), it will be possible to modify the id, no matter if the partition is going to be formatted or not. Of course, the logic to propose the best option every time the user selects a file system type is still there, but now it can be always overridden if the user wish. That change resulted in a small rearrangement of the widgets in that screen, as you can see below (remember we are trying to be very conservative with the UI changes in the Partitioner).

Partitioner: better support for DASD

In our previous report we explained some of the aspects in which the Direct-access storage devices (DASD) used in s390 mainframes are different from regular hard disks. But as you can imagine, there are more differences… and we know our readers love to learn new stuff while enjoying our reports. 😉

In short, there are two possible kinds of DASDs devices: Extended Count Key Data (ECKD) and Fixed Block Architecture (FBA). As explained in the previous report, the ECKD devices need to be formatted at low-level in order to be used by the operating system and, moreover, there are two possible low-formats for them: Compatible Disk Layout (CDL) and Linux Disk Layout (LDL).

And now the fun – ECKD devices formatted as LDL do NOT have a partition table. FBA devices can potentially have one, but it’s also often skipped. To manage those DASDs without partition table, the Linux kernel simulates an implicit single partition taking the whole disk. Of course, working with such implicit partitions implies some restrictions, and we have introduced several controls to make sure things stay under control in the storage-ng Partitioner. For example, an error message is now shown if the user tries to remove an implicit partition.

For curious readers, there is more information about DASD available in this link.

Partitioner: can’t resize a partition… but why?

In SLE15 and openSUSE Leap 15 we will report very detailed reasons why a partition or a file system cannot be resized, as you can see in this screenshot.

This used to be just a very simplistic message “Device cannot be resized”. But there may be many reasons for that, and sometimes different restrictions might contradict each other: While some type of file system only lets you grow, not shrink (e.g. XFS), the partition that the file system is on might not be able to grow, for example because there is another partition right next to it. We want to minimize user frustration that might happen when we only report the first reason, and when the user somehow managed to fix that problem, show another one that can’t be fixed.

As usual, this feature will be available in Tumbleweed in a matter of days.

Handling registration rollback in SLE15 Migration

Of course, the Partitioner was not the only YaST area to get attention during this sprint. Several aspects related to products, modules and extensions were also worked, with all the implications they have about registration, migration and licenses.

For the offline migration to SLE15 we reused some parts from the online migration which handles service pack upgrade. But it tuned out that the reused part was not correctly integrated into the installer and in some corner cases (registration errors) it did not behave correctly.

Moreover if the upgrade failed early then the system still contained a SLE12 installation but was registered as a SLE15 system on the SCC server. After booting the original SLE12 system the access to the online repositories was broken.

This sprint we fixed that so in case of registration error or when going back the original registration is restored. Now you can go back and choose a different system to upgrade and it will work as expected.

Additionally we fixed some small issues with custom repositories (add-on or driver updates) used at upgrade.

More fun with hiding/showing beta versions in SLE15

Usual readers of our blog already know that SUSE is taking extensions and modules to a whole new level in SLE15, making them a cornerstone of the system installation and upgrade process. As already explained in previous posts, that implies more complex dependencies between extensions and modules. All those mechanisms usually work nice… except a small problem we found out with beta versions.

If a given extension was in beta phase and some of its dependencies were also in beta, if the “Hide Beta Versions” checkbox was unchecked the system was displaying only the extension selected by the user, but not the auto-selected dependent beta extensions. Our SLE testers found that quite confusing. So to make everyone’s life easier, we fixed the behavior as shown in the following screenshot.

A look into the future: analyzing how we display licenses

Currently there are many different ways to handle and display licenses. That can happen during the installation or upgrade process, while adding additional products to an installed system and, last but not least, while using YaST2 Firstboot to perform additional installation steps on the first system execution.

Additional there are 3 different locations from which these licenses come from. They can be provided by the SUSE Customer Center, be provided by libzypp or come from a repository using a legacy approach.

To simplify and unify all that in a close future, the first step was researching all those possibilities and how they are handled in (Auto)YaST. The result of such research can be found in this document hosted on Github.

AutoYaST product selection and installer update improvements

As you probably already know, starting with SLE-15, all products are distributed using one medium and you need to choose explicitly which product to install. Of course, if the medium only contains one product that would not be needed.

In AutoYaST profile the product is selected using the /software/products/product XML node:

<software>
  <products config:type="list">
    <product>SLED</product>
  </products>
</software>

Due to a bug, the cloned system exported the product short_name instead of the name, resulting in an internal error reported by the installer update and a later error during the auto-installation which aborted it because no product was selected.

So, during this sprint we have made improvements for both scenarios.

1. The installer update will not rely in the product selection at all (the installer is the same for all the products) but will use the self_update_id from the control file and the version and architecture from the first product available on the media. The installer update documentation has been also updated according the last changes and it is probably the best place for knowing more about its behavior.
2. The wrong product selection error reported was not very useful and it was decided to provide more information about the list of available products from the media. Just see the image below with the latest implementation:

Document main differences in AutoYaST profiles between SLE12 and SLE15

The need to select a product is not the only relevant change affecting AutoYaST profiles for SLE15. There are many other significant changes in SLE15 compared to SLE12. Like the new modules concept, replacing SuSEfirewall2 with firewalld, replacing ntp with Chrony… Users wanting to reuse existing SLE12 profiles with SLE-15, will probably need to adjust them.

We have created this summary describing some of the most important changes in order to help with the conversion.

That document is just a preliminary and temporary work that is currently being reviewed and improved by the awesome documentation team at SUSE. Very soon (probably already done at the time you are reading this) the content will be merged and a new section titled “Main differences between SLES 12 and 15 profiles” will be available in the current guide for AutoYaST. Have we ever mentioned how much the doc team rocks? So please, use that last link as final reference instead of our temporary summary.

Cron config for NTP client

It is possible to setup the YaST-ntp-client module to sync the system clock at regular intervals. If that feature is used, YaST writes the needed configuration to a cron.d config file. We were still using “novell” as part of the name of such file, which was reported as a bug. It turned to be a good opportunity to take a look to a module that, as you can guess from that bug, we don’t update very often. 😉

First of all, we made sure that newly written files will have a more up-to-date name. Straightforward and easy.

The second part was to provide an upgrade path if the file already existed. We integrated that with the existing ntp to chrony conversion. That means the existing configuration is updated when a new version of the yast2-ntp-client package is installed, so the user does not need to run the module again to start using chrony with an existing configuration.

Last but not least, the third part was to adapt the package to be a better citizen in the RPM world, marking that file as ghost file in RPM spec. Now this command can recognize that yast2-ntp-client is responsible for that configuration file.

  rpm -qf <file>

Two months… and counting

Only two months of countdown until the release date of openSUSE Leap 15! That means a lot of hard work ahead of us, so stay tuned for more updates.