Private loop devices with loopfs

Posted May 7, 2020 18:12 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
Parent article: Private loop devices with loopfs

Legacy applications aside, I wonder if loop-control could just have an ioctl that returns a new file descriptor for a loopback device, and then the new mount API could support passing that file descriptor in to mount it, without having to give it a "loopN" device name.

Hidden devices

Posted May 7, 2020 18:19 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a provision for creating detached mounts directly with the new API, yes. We sort of skipped over that in the article, but probably should not have. The changelog to this patch describes it briefly.

Hidden devices

Posted May 10, 2020 22:20 UTC (Sun) by simcop2387 (subscriber, #101710) [Link]

A quick glance didn't seem to indicate it right away, but does anyone know if this mode works with raw disk images? in particular ones that are partitioned (GPT, MBR, etc). With the normal loopback devices you can tell the kernel to read the partition table from it (losetup -P in particular) and then use that to mount a given partition inside the image without having to do any offset, surgery, or other calculations to do it manually