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Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 08:06:17 -0800
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Randall R Schulz <rrschulz AT cris DOT com>
Subject: Re: loopback devise (was Re: mknod implementation? ... )
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Robert,

I don't think a loopback device in Cygwin would get you anywhere. 
Cygwin doesn't implement file systems. It's notion of "mounting" is 
very different from that of Unix or even Windows. A Cygwin mount is 
just a kind of name mapping, really (with a few options attached to the 
mount such as default file access mode, in the text vs. binary sense).

Even if you had a file system image in a file (even if it was a file 
system format supported by Windows), a loopback device supported by 
Cygwin wouldn't get you anywhere. Possibly Windows itself would be 
amenable to this concept of a loopback driver, but the loopback driver 
would have to be a Windows driver. If you had a Windows loopback driver 
and a Linux file system image file, you'd still be stuck, since Windows 
includes no file system driver for non-Windows file systems (though 
there may well be 3rd-party drivers for that purpose).


Randall Schulz


At 22:49 2003-02-24, Robert Citek wrote:

>At 08:37 PM 2/24/2003 -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 01:52:15PM -0800, Randall R Schulz wrote:
> >>Does Cygwin have a loopback block device?
> >
> >No.
> >
> >As Randall correctly points out, the existence of the mknod command has
> >no bearing on the existence of functionality like a loopback device.
>
>Are there plans to include the functionality of a loopback device in future
>releases of Cygwin?  If so, what can I do to help that process along?  Keep
>in mind I am not a systems programer.
>
>Regards,
>- Robert


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