[Planetlab-arch] Anybody done this

[David G. Andersen]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 10:21:08AM -0800, Steve Muir scribed:
> micro-response:
> 
> On Wed, 31 Mar 2004, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> 
> >   Also I'd like to make ext2 file systems *inside* files and binaries -
> > and send complete ext2 filesystems in binaries as messages.
> 
> you can already do this in Linux using loopback mounts e.g., one can mount
> an ISO CD-ROM image at a certain mountpoint and access the contents of the
> image as a (read-only) directory tree.  other UNIX-like systems may have
> equivalent functionality.

  On bsd, it's the vnode functionality (4.x and under), or "md"
functionality in 5.0.  For 4-stable:

  vnconfig -c -v /dev/cn0 /path/to/image
  mount -t <image_type> -o <mount_options> /dev/vn0 /mnt

Ridiculously handy when trying to, say, distribute out filesystem
images to remote Internet testbed machines. :)  The path to moun
you can get by just dd'ing a disk to an image file.

  -Dave

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      MIT Laboratory for Computer Science           http://www.angio.net/