Would it be possible to do development of these things (especially the dm part) to an open place? I'm very interested in the inner workings of device-mapper and the new 2.5/2.6 kernel block io code.
If I had more time and would be able to understand these things better I would have written some code by now (perhaps porting some of the missing dm targets from 2.4 to 2.5 or so), but if I can see progress step by step I'll perhaps be able to help. Or at least test it.
The latest kernels have a somewhat modified loop.c so that it supports additional encryption again (cryptoloop.c), perhaps you can use some of that code somehow.
And, I was just wondering, would it be theoretically possible to write a dm target that stores data in a file, so that it replaces what the loop device does? Or was dm not designed for this?