[Fedora-livecd-list] [PATCH 2/2] allow user specifiable number of loop devices

[Jeremy Katz]

On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 05:31 -0500, Douglas McClendon wrote:
> Jeremy recently committed a patch which changed the number of loop
> devices created from 128 to 16.  I don't know if there was some
> measurable performance reason for this or not.  

There's some impact with udev startup.  And Harald asked nicely :)

> I had always guessed
> that the reason David chose such a large number originally was because
> of the fact that unlike in a normal system, in a LiveOS system, a loop
> device is used for the rootfs, and therefore the loop driver can never
> be removed and readded with a larger number of devices if needed.

I thought it was just that he liked big numbers :-)

> This patch adds an optional kernel commandline parameter
> num_loopdevs=<int> which will cause that many loop devices to be created
> instead of the default of 16.  This will be useful for people using the
> livecd who need lots of loop devices, but doesn't interfere with
> whatever reasons justified the lowering from 128 to 16.

I'd rather go with using loop.max_loop as the option.  My reason being
that we want to get to where modprobe will look at things
from /proc/cmdline and pass options in general with the same syntax as
if the module were compiled into the kernel.  I don't think that work
will get done for F8, but this way, we're already using the syntax that
we'll want for the future.

Jeremy