[Gllug] Raw Partitions

[Ben Fitzgerald]

On Wed, Nov 16, 2005 at 06:05:47PM +0100, Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> Christian Smith wrote:
> >What ioctls would be needed?
> 
> 
> Well, for one, unless I'm _really_ out of touch.  You can't write to a 
> loop device.  File systems so mounted are read-only.  No?

Hi,

Maybe I got the wrong end of the stick with your comment above as it
doesn't make perfect sense to me, so if this is telling you how to suck
eggs then sorry!

I just had a play with losetup, which I was unaware of. You can create a
file of say 100k in size, use losetup to associate /dev/loop0 with the
file then format /dev/loop0 and mount it rw:

debian:~# df -h /mnt/
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/loop0             93K   13K   75K  15% /mnt

If you simply mount a file, such as an initrd file with an ext2 fs (when
decompressed) you can have that rw:

# mount | grep /mnt
/export/home/ben/tmp/initrd.ext2 on /mnt type ext2 (rw,loop=/dev/loop0)

Looks from the above that it, as the OP said, uses /dev/loop#
implicitly.

Cheers,

Ben.

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