From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756728AbXJ3UMp (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:12:45 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1752777AbXJ3UMh (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:12:37 -0400 Received: from pentafluge.infradead.org ([213.146.154.40]:44647 "EHLO pentafluge.infradead.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1752024AbXJ3UMh (ORCPT ); Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:12:37 -0400 Subject: Re: [PATCH] Allow auto-destruction of loop devices. From: David Woodhouse To: Andrew Morton Cc: torvalds@linux-foundation.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, bernie@codewiz.org In-Reply-To: <20071030130137.3345ae43.akpm@linux-foundation.org> References: <1193612911.2915.80.camel@shinybook.infradead.org> <20071030130137.3345ae43.akpm@linux-foundation.org> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:12:51 -0400 Message-Id: <1193775171.2651.46.camel@shinybook.infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.12.1 (2.12.1-3.fc8.dwmw2.1) Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-SRS-Rewrite: SMTP reverse-path rewritten from by pentafluge.infradead.org See http://www.infradead.org/rpr.html Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Tue, 2007-10-30 at 13:01 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote: > Why do we want to do this? In general, so that we can automatically allocate loop devices (as with losetup -f) and have them disappear when we're done with them. In particular, right now, so that we can stop relying on the hackish special-case in umount(8) which kills off loop devices which were set up by 'mount -oloop'. That means we can stop putting crap in /etc/mtab which doesn't belong there, which means it can be a symlink to /proc/mounts, which means yet another writable file on the root filesystem is eliminated and the 'stateless' folks get happier... and OLPC trac #356 can be closed. The mount(8) side of that is at http://marc.info/?l=util-linux-ng&m=119362955431694&w=2 -- dwmw2