OpenRiot v7.9.18 — The One Where We Learned to Read dmesg

“It said sd0 was available. We believed it. The kernel laughed.” — The OpenRiot Crew, discovering that AVAILABLE and ALREADY IN USE can both be true at the same time

Release Overview

v7.9.18 ships the Disk Manager (openriot --disk) — a Bubble Tea TUI for discover, mount, umount, format, encrypt, and benchmark operations. Drive detection now works correctly on systems with softraid crypto root.

⚠️ Experimental. The Disk Manager builds, passes tests, and correctly discovers/enumerates drives on this system, but read-write operations (mount/umount/format/encrypt/benchmark) have not been thoroughly tested. Use with caution.

The Drive Detection Fix Saga

The softraid-aware drive detection was broken in several layers:

  1. parseSoftraid() ran doas bioctl softraid0 which failed silently — no PATH, no stderr capture, no fallback. All softraid awareness collapsed: no IsChunk, no IsEncrypted, no cross-mount mapping.

  2. DiscoverDrives only read root from dmesg, which can show the physical chunk (root on sd1a) with or without a /dev/ prefix, and didn’t trace through softraid.

  3. filterDrives excluded ineligible drives from action lists instead of showing them as non-selectable — users couldn’t see WHY a drive was blocked.

  4. parseMounts only cross-mapped virtual→physical, missing the reverse direction when mount output showed the physical chunk.

  5. MountDrive, like Format/Encrypt/Umount before it, had no backend safety guard — root/chunk protection relied entirely on filtering.

The fix: independent flag detection with dmesg fallback

Instead of relying on a single bioctl-based softraid mapping, each drive gets its flags from multiple independent sources:

Flag Primary source Fallback
IsChunk parseSoftraid hasRAID from disklabel
IsEncrypted parseSoftraid isVirtualOnSoftraidBus from
    dmesg
IsRoot mount output ( on / ) dmesg root on

The isVirtualOnSoftraidBus helper parses dmesg for devices attached to a scsibus owned by softraid0 — no pairing heuristics, works with any number of volumes.

All drives now appear in all action lists with their status ([ROOT], [CHUNK], [MOUNTED], [ENCRYPTED], [AVAILABLE]). Selection-time guards block operations on ineligible drives with a clear message instead of silently hiding them.

A system integration test (diskintegration_test.go) verifies the detection on this hardware:

sd0  3726 GB  chunk=true  raid=true           ← NVMe chunk
sd1  3725 GB  root=true mounted=true          ← virtual root
         encrypted=true

Highlights

New: openriot --disk (⚠️ Experimental)

  • Bubble Tea TUI with menu, drive list, confirm, password prompt, benchmark presets, and result screens
  • Discover, Mount, Umount, Format, Encrypt, Benchmark operations
  • softraid-aware: virtual devices and physical chunks mapped independently
  • Root/chunk drives shown but non-selectable
  • Benchmark presets: Quick (512MB/15s), Standard (2GB/60s), Thorough (4GB/180s)

Fixed: Drive detection reliability

  • Root detection from mount output (preferred), dmesg fallback
  • dmesg /dev/ prefix stripped when parsing root device
  • parseMounts bidirectional cross-map (virtual↔physical)
  • parseSoftraid uses CombinedOutput, /sbin/bioctl, any Volume line (not just CRYPTO), and falls back to dmesg
  • isVirtualOnSoftraidBus dmesg helper — no pairing heuristics

Fixed: Safety

  • filterDrives shows ALL drives; selection blocked at runtime
  • IsChunk guard added to updateDriveList selection
  • MountDrive calls guardDrive() like Format/Encrypt/Umount
  • Mount filter blocks IsRoot and IsChunk at the UI level

🧾 Files Changed

File Change
source/disk/disk.go NEW — --disk entry point
source/disk/model.go NEW — model, key map, presets
source/disk/view.go NEW — all rendering
source/disk/update.go NEW — key handlers, async cmds
source/disk/backend.go NEW — backend ops, softraid
source/disk/filter.go NEW — action-aware drive filter
source/disk/export_test.go NEW — test bridges
source/disk/diskintegration_test.go NEW — system test
source/commands/commands.go Added --disk command
source/settings/settings.go Added Disk Manager menu entry
config/rofi/apps.txt Added openriot_disk window class
config/window/icons.toml Added openriot_disk icon
install/packages.yaml Added fio-3.41
README.md Disk Manager section (Experimental)
assets/disk.webp NEW — Disk Manager screenshot
Specs/DiskManager.md Bug tracker (26 issues resolved)

🗣️ Final Words

“We spent six sessions chasing an empty map. The answer was in dmesg the whole time.” — The OpenRiot Crew, on isVirtualOnSoftraidBus