Last weekend I set myself the task to write an ATA S.M.A.R.T. (i.e. hard disk health monitoring) reader and parser. After spending some time reading all kinds of T13 and T10 docs and a bit of hacking I now present you the following new software:
- libatasmart: a lean, small and clean implementation of an ATA S.M.A.R.T. reading and parsing library. It's fairly comprehensive, however I only support a subset of the full S.M.A.R.T. set of functions: those parts which made sense to me, not the esoteric stuff. Here's the API and here's the README.
- skdump: a little tool that produces a similar output to smartctl -a, but uses libatasmart.
- sktest: a little tool for starting/aborting S.M.A.R.T. self-tests, based on libatasmart
- gnome-disk-health-service: a little wrapper around libatasmart that exports its entire functionality via D-Bus, so that unpriviliged processes can introspect a drive's health records, including temperature, number of bad sectors and suchlike. This is written in Vala, which BTW is awesome for doing D-Bus services. Actually after having done this once now I really hope I will never have to write a D-Bus server without Vala again. I also wrote a Vala .vapi file for libatasmart which is shipped in its tarball.
- gnome-disk-health: a little tool that reads the S.M.A.R.T. data from g-d-h-s and presents it in a pretty dialog. Includes support for viewing attributes and starting self-tests and stuff. Also written with Vala.
Why? You might ask what the point of all this stuff is where smartmontools already exists. What I'd like to see on future GNOME desktops is that as soon as a disk starts to fail a notification bubble pops up warning the user about this fact, and suggesting that he makes backups and replaces the disk. For a tight integration into the desktop, a S.M.A.R.T. implementation that is small, and not C++, and a library (i.e. embeddable into other software with a sane interface) is highly preferable. Also, stuff like distribution installers should link against libatasmart to warn the user about old, and defective disks before he even starts the installation on them. (Hey, anaconda developers! That means you! It's a tiny library, and all you need to do is a single call: int sk_disk_smart_status(SkDisk *d, SkBool *good);)
Please note that I certainly don't plan to replace smartmontools. libatasmart will always implement only a subset of S.M.A.R.T. If you want the full set of functionality then please refer to smartmontools.
Where's this going? I plan to fully maintain libatasmart (including skdump and sktest) for the future. However g-d-h and g-d-h-s will probably just bitrot in my repository -- unless someone else wants to pick this up and maintain it. The reason my further interest in those tools is rather limited is that for the long run we will hopefully will see davidz's DeviceKit-disks (screenhot) changed to use this library for health monitoring. Then DK-d will export the S.M.A.R.T. info on the bus, and a separate daemon would not be necessary anymore. DK-d provides a single interface for all kinds of health parameters for storage, including RAID health and suchlike. I thus think this is the way forward and not g-d-h-s. (That should, of course, not hinder anyone to step up and take up maintainership of g-d-h/g-d-h-s if he wants to. There might be good reasons for doing so. Maybe because you need something to do, or because you want a S.M.A.R.T. solution for the desktop now, and not wait until DeviceKit gets pushed into all the distros).
So, here's where you can get this stuff:
git://git.0pointer.de/libatasmart.git
git://git.0pointer.de/gnome-disk-health.git
I will roll a 0.1 tarball of libatasmart soon. I'd be thankful if people could run skdump on their disks and check if its output is basically the same as smartctl -a's. Especially people with BE machines.
Of course the most important part of a software announcement is always the screenshot:
return -ETOOMANYDOTS;