Storage tips & tricks

Agama relies on yast2-storage-ng for the management of storage devices such as disks, partitions, LVM, RAID, etc. Thus, the environment variables honored by that YaST component can be used to modify its behavior.

That is especially useful for development purposes. In particular, setting the following two variables for the Agama service will allow to emulate a system with any storage setup.

YAST_TEST_MODE=1
YAST_DEVICEGRAPH_FILE=/path/to/a/devicegraph.xml

The file specified at YAST_DEVICEGRAPH_FILE must contain a devicegraph description in any of the formats supported for that purpose by yast2-storage-ng, either XML (native libstorage-ng format) or YAML (documented here).

Note that, at several points during the system installation process, yast2-storage-ng stores representations of the devicegraph (in both formats) at /var/log/YaST2/storage-inst.