• David Woodhouse's avatar
    Allow auto-destruction of loop devices · 96c58655
    David Woodhouse authored
    This allows a flag to be set on loop devices so that when they are
    closed for the last time, they'll self-destruct.
    
    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
    
    [akpm@linux-foundation.org: coding-style fixes]
    Signed-off-by: default avatarDavid Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org>
    Cc: Bernardo Innocenti <bernie@codewiz.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    96c58655
loop.c 38.3 KB