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Data Storage GUI Red Hat Software

Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager 170

sfcrazy writes Developer Vratislav Podzimek has announced the next-gen partition manager for Fedora, blivet-gui. It is eventually going to replace GParted, the most popular GUI based partition manager, found in all major distros. The new tool is named blivet-gui after the blivet python library (originally Anaconda's storage management and configuration tool). The need of a new partition manager stems from the fact that none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies. Fedora's Anaconda base supports all, though, and is hence chosen as the back-end for this new tool. The application is only a few months old but is already looking nice and useful. Features like RAID and BTRFS support are being worked on. Vojtech Trefny is the other developer working with Vratislav on blivet-gui. Here's the announcement.
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Fedora To Get a New Partition Manager

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  • So.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07, 2014 @06:03PM (#47848773)

    Fedora is going to replace GParted none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies. Theyre replacing it with blivet-gui which doesnt support features like RAID and BTRFS.

    That hat too tight?

    • Fedora is going to replace GParted none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies. Theyre replacing it with blivet-gui which doesnt support features like RAID and BTRFS.

      That hat too tight?

      The hat is cool!

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        Are you the Judean People's Front?

        Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People's Front.

        P.F.J.: Yeah...

        JUDITH: Splitters.

        P.F.J.: Splitters...

        FRANCIS: And the Judean Popular People's Front.

        P.F.J.: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Splitters. Splitters...

        LORETTA: And the People's Front of Judea.

        P.F.J.: Yeah. Splitters. Splitters...

    • Re: So.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Guy Smiley ( 9219 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @10:15PM (#47849871)

      In typical open source fashion, their replacing a tool (GParted) that doesn't support a few features they want with a new one that (at least initially) didn't support _any_ features at all because it was written from scratch.

      Why not just fix GParted to add the few missing features instead of writing a completely new too? The new one will of course itself not support all the features GParted had, but instead be chok full of new bugs that will take years to find and fix...

      Why is it that everyone wants to reinvent the wheel instead of using and improving the tools we already have?

      • Re: So.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by bored ( 40072 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @11:09PM (#47850073)

        I considered moderating you, but I think this is really a case of <whine> "C++ is haaardddd, learning it enough to understand how to plug in a new module is going to take me months. Instead I'm going to rewrite it" </whine>

        Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..

        Frankly, its fsking stupid and its another sign that redhat is jumping the shark.

        Plus, do you really want to depend on the skills of some "leet" hacker that thinks python is an appropriate tool for this?

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          This is a partition editor. It gets run O(1) times on each computer, within an environment that, if python is not supported, it should not be run.

        • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Give it a rest. Someone pissy enough about not having python installed isn't a wuss using a GUI partition tool. You're the fscking stupid one.

          • Fedora installs python as part of its base, pretty much all the command line system-* tools used to install and configure rh/fedora are written in python, hence there is a large community of devs who work in python at the system level, and a bunch of existing python libraries for touching just about every part of the system, including as pointed out in the article all the filesystems supported by the installer. While i am not a python programmer, and not a system level hacker, i can see how the approach ma
        • Re: So.... (Score:4, Informative)

          by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday September 08, 2014 @05:27AM (#47851009)

          Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..

          gparted is a graphical tool for editing partitions and already has a raft of dependencies. One more won't make a difference especially since python is used increasingly in core distributions for scripting instead of bash.

          Secondly, perhaps the reason that gparted is considered a mess is precisely because it mixes up the graphical parts and the low level stuff in one package, a problem compounded because the installer also has its own partition editor. Fedora appears to have written a layer called blivet to abstract out partitioning from the installer GUI and therefore it makes sense that they use it in the desktop also.

          • Microsoft wasn't thoughtful enough to provide a port of Visual Basic for Linux. But there are lots of programs that deserve something between quick-and-dirty and full-on C or Java. Perl and Tcl were kind of filling that space, but one's write-only and the other isn't a complete system, but rather a way of stringing system tools together, one step up from raw shell scripts.

            Python is Linux's version of Visual Basic. It's easy to understand, has a rich set of system interface libraries (which install without t

          • Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..

            gparted is a graphical tool for editing partitions and already has a raft of dependencies. One more won't make a difference especially since python is used increasingly in core distributions for scripting instead of bash.

            Secondly, perhaps the reason that gparted is considered a mess is precisely because it mixes up the graphical parts and the low level stuff in one package, a problem compounded because the installer also has its own partition editor. Fedora appears to have written a layer called blivet to abstract out partitioning from the installer GUI and therefore it makes sense that they use it in the desktop also.

            If you do not like the new tool, continue with Gparted. I am sure the Debian guys and SUSe will arrange for the RAID stuff to be included in Gparted.

        • by gilboad ( 986599 )

          God knows why anyone moderated your comment as insightful.

          1. Fedora / RedHat is targeting, wait for it, Fedora / RedHat. End of story.
          As someone that maintains a fairly large DPI (kernel/user-land) software and a management software that uses PyGI, I can from attest from personal experience that both PyGI and PyGTK under both Fedora and RHEL are top-notch with zero dependencies issues.
          2. PyGI is *far* easier to use than Qt/C++. We wrote the original management code in Qt, but switched to PyGI as it increase

        • I considered moderating you, but I think this is really a case of <whine> "C++ is haaardddd, learning it enough to understand how to plug in a new module is going to take me months. Instead I'm going to rewrite it" </whine>

          Or similar bullshit by people who think "scripting" languages are appropriate for base system tools. Now you will have python dependency hell every-time you want to do something simple like repartition your disks. Oh, and is that project python 2 or python 3? On and on..

          Frankly, its fsking stupid and its another sign that redhat is jumping the shark.

          Plus, do you really want to depend on the skills of some "leet" hacker that thinks python is an appropriate tool for this?

          Considering that Anaconda itself is written in python, that shark is about 15 years in the rear-view mirror. They didn't pick the name "Anaconda" for nothing.

          I guess that python was an appropriate tool after all.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Q: Why not just fix GParted?
        A: NIH [wikipedia.org]

        I wish this was a joke.

      • Re: So.... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Monday September 08, 2014 @03:37AM (#47850751)

        In typical open source fashion, their replacing a tool (GParted) that doesn't support a few features they want with a new one that (at least initially) didn't support _any_ features at all because it was written from scratch.

        Why not just fix GParted to add the few missing features instead of writing a completely new too? The new one will of course itself not support all the features GParted had, but instead be chok full of new bugs that will take years to find and fix...

        Why is it that everyone wants to reinvent the wheel instead of using and improving the tools we already have?

        In the typical open source fashion people thinking they're experts will blindly criticise someone's decision without understanding it. How about you start with blivet-gui is not a partition manager and then work onwards from there with your understanding.

        Blivet-gui is a standalone implementation of the storage manager used during the install process. Yes it can partition, and in the true open source fashion it uses another program to do so (parted), but that's a small subset of what they want to use it for which is more like be a one stop shop for all disk management, volume management, and RAID management.

        Please put the pitchfork away.

      • by gilboad ( 986599 )

        ... Have your bothered to read the release message instead of rushing to press the "save" button you'd notice the following [1]:

        "Why not use GParted you ask? The reason we came up with blivet-gui is that none of the existing storage management tools supports all storage technologies supported in modern Linux distributions. Anaconda does support them all so it's only logical to take Anaconda's storage backend, combine it with a nice, intuitive and in general user-friendly frontend and build a standalone appl

      • by heson ( 915298 )
        No thats not the Fedora way. The Fedora way is replacing working feature filled software with buggy software that barely solves the mandatory features just because it has some cool new feature. Then they push a gazillion man hours into that crap until it becomes very good and then replaces it when users starts to love it.
    • by zdzichu ( 100333 )

      Fedora isn't. It just some guy choosen to announce his project on fedora-devel mailing list.

    • Blivet GUI is a frontend to the Blivet storage management library, which already supports RAID and BTRFS just fine. It is just not yet supported in the GUI, but I suppose it should be added soon.
  • A new goodie tool.
  • by Nimey ( 114278 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @06:07PM (#47848791) Homepage Journal

    Ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, i.e. a nasty, dirty situation. It seems to have originated around the 1940s as US military slang.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag,

      A fantastic deal! if you're a dung beetle.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 07, 2014 @06:50PM (#47849001)

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blivet

      It is a poiuyt, devil's fork or widget, is an undecipherable figure, an optical illusion and an impossible object. It appears to have three cylindrical prongs at one end which then mysteriously transform into two rectangular prongs at the other end.

    • I've always heard that it was six pounds. It's funnier because the bag might survive or it might break but you won't know when or where.

    • Lets say that storage management is a rather interesting area to be involved in. ;-)
  • by turbidostato ( 878842 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @06:08PM (#47848803)

    "The need of a new partition manager stems from the fact that none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies"

    Does the backend -and kickstart, support all those "modern storage technologies"?

    That's the important part. For a GUI-based installation, the ability to format -and install into, a single root partition is good enough for me.

    • Re:Damn the GUI! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @06:20PM (#47848871) Journal
      Yeah, another example of NIH coming from RedHat.
      • by Anonymous Coward

        The emotional reaction to your statement is something that I had to remind myself shouldn't be said in public, so I won't repeat it here.

        Keep in mind that NIH at RedHat makes very little sense in the big scheme of things, when they fund at least 60% of all open source software development. Sure, they probably don't fund any geneology software or the latest MP3 player, but you'd have very few compilers, system software, etc without RedHat picking up the bill.

        So, not invented here rarely makes sense with Red

      • by jafac ( 1449 )

        lol-ing at your comment, and your .sig :D

    • "The need of a new partition manager stems from the fact that none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies"

      Does the backend -and kickstart, support all those "modern storage technologies"?

      That's the important part. For a GUI-based installation, the ability to format -and install into, a single root partition is good enough for me.

      Yes - the blivet storage management library supports alsmost any existing data storage technology you can come up with and then some more. Thats the reason why Blivet GUI came to be - the functionality is already there, it just needs to be exposed by a graphical user interface.

  • by sayfawa ( 1099071 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @06:12PM (#47848829)
    Instead of making another program, I wonder what was wrong with sharing the code with gparted so that they could incorporate support for more filesystems?

    TFA didn't say if that option had been explored.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      blivet-gui is Gtk application written in Python, like all of redHat's tools. I don't know what gparted is written in, but it's probably not Python.

      RedHat is also known for having a bad case of Not-Invented-Here as well as wanting more control over a significant piece of their distro.

    • by Burdell ( 228580 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @07:39PM (#47849263)

      Because (as usual) the summary got it wrong. This is not a partition manager, it is a disk/filesystem manager. Partitions make up one part of that, but it is also intended to manage LVM, RAID, btrfs filesets, etc. I believe it uses the parted library on the backend for partitions.

      This is based on the years-of-development code used in the backend of anaconda, the Fedora/Red Hat installer. The code has been pulled out, split up into a library, and set up for stand-alone use (after install). I believe the intention is that anaconda keeps using the library, but now there will be the same interface during install and afterwards for managing disks and filesystems.

    • My guess the answer is that then there would be two separate code bases, one in gparted and another that anaconda uses. Considering so much Fedora/RedHat is built around anaconda, it makes sense to reuse some of anaconda code in places other than installer.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    If their liveCD installer is any indication, I'm not going to touch this with a ten foot pole. Its behavior is essentially random, whether it comes to partition numbering, free space reporting, and partition creation.

    • If their liveCD installer is any indication, I'm not going to touch this with a ten foot pole. Its behavior is essentially random, whether it comes to partition numbering, free space reporting, and partition creation."

      Last time I tried, Fedora managed to install next to Ubuntu, without problems. The only distro that without fail, trashes dual-boot, is Windows ..
    • Talk is cheap - bugreports/logs or it din't happen. :P
  • Oblig. XKCD (Score:1, Redundant)

    by NotInHere ( 3654617 )
    • An application is not a standard.

  • I sure hope it won't be the geniuses who brought us the incomprehensible "new Anaconda" interface several Fedora releases ago.

    • what do you mean several releases ago. It's still not as good as it could be in Fedora 20. IIRC it still doesn't let you individualize the packages installed, only letting you select "groups". One of my goals as a Fedora user is to NOT have to deal with the installer and I pray that "fedup" works properly so I don't have to.

  • Idiots (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I hate the FOSS mentality sometimes. So much unnecessary reinventing the wheel when all that's need is some enhancement of an existing tool. It seems like it'd make much more sense to take GParted, a very mature, well-supported and proven tool, and extend its feature set to incorporate the "modern technology" they require, rather than create a whole new tool almost from scratch and deal with an unproved base. They can either work with the GParted developers to incorporate these new features, or fork it and

    • by kesuki ( 321456 )

      that worked great for openssl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbleed [wikipedia.org]
      their solution? a fork to libssl without all the messy kludges for various vendors/platforms.

    • take it and use what's already been developed and use it as a base to create something new/better,
      while letting the original developers take all the credit

      Fixed that for you.

      Also, making changes to somebody else's code involves the risk of introducing serious bugs. So essentially, what you are proposing is a lose/lose situation.

    • Um, Blivet GUI is jut a GUI frontend to the existing Blivet storage library that has been there for years (many, many years if you include the time it was part of the Anaconda core). Adding the same functionality to GParted or making GParted use Blivet on the other hand would be one big useless rewrite.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    For surely they will want to integrate it.

  • by dbc ( 135354 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @07:04PM (#47849087)

    Not flamage, this is data-seeking. The announcement only vaguely states that existing tools don't support all modern storage technologies. So, what are the technologies where blivit gets a "yes" and gparted gets a "no" in the "supports " column?

  • Command line? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by ToasterMonkey ( 467067 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @07:07PM (#47849097) Homepage

    I'm completely fine seeing things move away from the older "GUI driving non-interactive commands in the background" model, to GUIs and CLIs that are built on shared libraries, because that potentially gives us THREE usable interfaces. However, is it normal for a CLI to lag behind the GUI now in Linuxland?

    I see that blivet comes from Anaconda, so I expect some integration there.
    It seems like a good CLI could be used to avoid the awkward practice [redhat.com] of writing out a kickstart partition fragment from the pre section. We could just drive Anaconda's partitioning directly from %pre with shell logic instead of pooping out Anaconda-ese to be parsed later.

    So where's my damned anaconda partitioning CLI already, this would affect more [important] people than yet another partition GUI!!

    • by Anonymous Coward
      Worst thing about anaconda partitioning tool is it decides what order your partitions should be on the drive. I always have to partition with gparted from an Ubuntu Live CD before installing RHEL/Fedora.
  • //How to know if an important back-end component of Linux will soon be replaced
    if (component.name=="linux-kernel*") { false; }
    else if (component.inventor=="Red Hat") { false; }
    else { true; }

    • by Nimey ( 114278 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @07:32PM (#47849239) Homepage Journal

      Could be worse: it could have been written by Lennart Poettering.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Could be worse: it could have been written by Lennart Poettering.

        Hey, you watch your tone! Lennart's arguably leading Linux development almost single-handedly now. Linus might be focused entirely on the kernel, but Lennart is doing all the work on system elements that are crucial to bring Linux into modern times. After Linus, Lennart's now the most prolific (and famous) Linux contributor of all time.

        Of course I'm just an AC, so there's no reason to listen to me. But I'm sure once Bennett Haselton write an a

        • It was a (poor) attempt a joke you stupid fucks. Clearly the mention of Bennett should have made it clear, as well as the suspiciously high praise of Lennart. But I suppose you're all idiots who can't grasp subtleties. Either that or you're just all stupid fucking americans.

  • by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Sunday September 07, 2014 @07:47PM (#47849311)

    The only reason that "anaconda's base supports all" is because anaconda, and kickstart tools, have the ability to support '%pre" scripts that allow manual use of hte command line partitioning tools to tune the partitioning as desired, and completely skip anaconda partition. Anaconda has never, and from all signes will never, be able to support all disk management and partitioning tools.

    Since it's a Python based wrapper for the actual system tools used, features can be added. But there will be inevitable mismatches between configurations manageable through anaconda, and configurations manageable through command line tools for new disk and filesystem tools. And anaconda's use in system critical critical tools like kickstart mean that it _must_ be thoroughly tested before updates. This will slow feature addition in a way that gparted, or other tools, need not support.

  • It was DOA as far as I was concerned. Redhat basically told the world "we don't care about the desktop" and it shows. Now, I still rely on Centos but I prefer debian and my users get mint. Fedora gets to make the false insinuation that they are redhat till stuf blows up or changes in midstream. It's not redhat and it's not a standard linx desktop. Fedora is what's left over after a bunch of junior hacks get done dicking around for the day. You get to pick up the pieces. Nobody in their right mind uses Fed
    • by thule ( 9041 )

      Then I guess I'm not in my right mind.

      I like Fedora a lot. I like the desktop environment (Gnome3 has really grown on me). Fedora moves at a decent clip to track with the latest and greatest without a lot of hassle. I have always liked RedHat/Fedora's PXE/kickstart installer. I like the big projects RedHat/Fedora is working on like FreeIPA, OpenStack packaging, GFS2, KVM, OpenLMI, CloudForms, and oVirt. RedHat has spent a lot of money buying some of the companies that created some of that software and the t

    • I have been using RedHat, Fedora, and CentOS as my personal desktop for a decade and CentOS is what I installed on desktop machines I managed. The meme that RedHat is no good for desktop is highly overblown. Just checked out CentOS 7 with Gnome, and thought the DE was still alright.

      One of my favorite things about RHEL/CentOS is a truly stable "enterprise grade" release cycle, meaning each version is supported for many years, but they give you updated installers with new drivers and such to be able to use th

  • "The need of a new partition manager stems from the fact that none of the existing GUI partitioning tools supports all modern storage technologies."
    That would be a lie. If that is all, just contribute to Parted already. As always more will be at stake, probable things like "not invented here" and "I wanna have the power". And as a result we get to have a partition editor that needs Python??

    • It's not rewriting parted. Parted can't handle all modern storage technologies as it only deals with partitions which are only one part (pun intended) of the picture. In the [your favourite distro here] installer the UI calls out a *suite* of tools just like Blivet-GUI does. Previously in Fedora this was all piled into Anaconda - but now it is split out into this "Blivet-GUI" thing.

      If you bothered to read the articles or browse the source you'd know that it depended on Blivet and subprocess calls to normal

  • I hope whatever its coming up with allows disk partition creation based on partition form kickstart scripts itself.
  • So we're stuck with either "impossible object" or "ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag".

    Naming is hard, but it's not *that* hard.

  • I don't know about needing a completely new partition manager, but certainly needs to read GPT partitions. In GParted, there is one disk I have just for Windows7, Windows partitioned it, but GParted reads the drive as unpartitioned / available. I asked around and people were thinking it was partitioned wrong that's why invisible.... well if Windows partitioned it's own partitions wrong....

    And please pick a better name than the proposed one, at least make the name pronouncable.

  • when you don't need them.
  • I am no partition manager expert, but if the existing most popular one is missing some features then why not implement them rather than producing yet another piece of software to fragment and complicate things. Are the existing ones that bad that they can't be improved?

  • Because I have a USB stick with GParted boot on it that does EVERYTHING and includes HFS, HFS+, NTFS, FAT32, ext2, ext3 and ext4. I think XFS is even in there.
  • by AdamWill ( 604569 ) on Monday September 08, 2014 @02:40PM (#47855269) Homepage

    Unfortunately, Mukt completely mis-reported this and Slashdot picked up their errors for the summary, which is making for a lot of confusion.

    tl;dr:

    1. blivet-gui isn't supposed to (and in fact cannot) 'replace' gparted in any reasonable sense of that term.
    2. blivet-gui is a new application, but its backend is the Fedora installer's storage management code, which is a very old codebase. There is no new storage management backend being written here.
    3. Lennart and systemd have nothing at all to do with this.
    4. It wouldn't really be practical to 'contribute' this to gparted, as it would involve completely ripping and replacing gparted's backend and then very rapidly proposing significant changes to the GUI, and hence would be a project takeover by any other name.
    5. blivet uses standard underlying tools for performing operations, it's just a logic/configuration layer for them.

    1: what the original announcement says is that blivet-gui uses a gparted-like UI to make it instantly familiar for gparted users. It doesn't say anything at all about it 'replacing' gparted. That's a pure invention (likely based on a misunderstanding) in the Mukt article. See the original announcement at https://lists.fedoraproject.or... [fedoraproject.org] to verify this, if you like. There's no sense in which blivet-gui really *could* "replace" gparted, if you think about it. gparted is an independent project; Red Hat doesn't own or maintain it, so Red Hat can't stop it existing or being maintained. gparted isn't a significant component for either RHEL or Fedora: it's just a leaf package, an app like any other. It's not like anaconda uses gparted as its partitioning tool, or anything like that. So talking about blivet-gui 'replacing' gparted doesn't make any sense, not upstream, not downstream. So long as upstream gparted devs see a need to keep developing gparted, gparted will continue to exist upstream, and so long as a Fedora packager wants gparted to be in Fedora, it'll be in Fedora, whether or not blivet-gui or any *other* storage management GUI app is also in Fedora. We have lots of space in the repos.

    2: the backend for blivet-gui is blivet: https://git.fedorahosted.org/g... [fedorahosted.org] (packaged in Fedora as python-blivet). This codebase is simply the storage management backend of anaconda (the Fedora installer) split out into its own repository. The split happened back in 2012: http://www.redhat.com/archives... [redhat.com] . The intent was to allow for exactly this kind of code re-use. So there really isn't some kind of new NIH effort going on here: the storage management code is not new, all that's new is the light wrapper around blivet to produce a standalone GUI app rather than using it as a part of the anaconda installer. The underlying codebase has existed basically as long as anaconda has existed, which is rather longer than gparted has existed. anaconda dates back to 1999 (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/History_of_Red_Hat_Linux ), gparted AFAICT dates back to 2004 (http://gparted.org/news.php?item=180 ).

    3: Doesn't really need expanding on, but no, there is absolutely zero link to Lennart, systemd, or any other systemd developers.

    4: so the reason to do blivet-gui at all, and the reason anaconda doesn't just call gparted for "partitioning" like ubiquity does, is it doesn't cover anywhere near the functionality we actually need for the Fedora (and, more to the point, RHEL) installer. gparted really is a *partitioning* tool, and there's a reason I keep referring to blivet as "storage management". It handles things that aren't just partitions. The most obvious examples are mdraid, LVM, and btrfs (insofar as btrfs acts as a volume management and redundancy system, not just as a simple filesystem like ext), but blivet has all sorts of other interesting capabilities too, primarily of interest t

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