Re: [PATCH] Modify loop device to be able to manage partitions of the disk image

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Thu, Mar 06, 2008 at 10:43:32AM +0100, Laurent Vivier wrote:
> This patch allows to use loop device with partitionned disk image.
> 
> Original behavior of loop is not modified.
> 
> A new parameter is introduced to define how many partition we want to be
> able to manage per loop device. This parameter is "max_part".

I've done something else before as have done others, but at that time
we didn't want it in because it breaks the device number encoding.

Nowdays where a lot of systems use udev it probably makes sense to put
it in.  The default is to not show any partitions which is safe.  Did
you test if udev is smart enough to find out loop has partitions when
loaded with the paramater?  If yes this can go in with a little
documentation added, if not please also work with the udev folks to
find a way to automatically detect that loop can sometimes support
partitions.