User Mode Linux

Loopback mountin' a specific partition inside a disk image

Loopback mounts are cool as heck. You can take a file containing an image of a partition and mount on top of your regular filesystem. But what if you have a file containing an entire disk image rather than just an image of a single partition? It's common to deal with such files when dealing with User Mode Linux (UML) root filesystems.

Well, you can still do it. It turns out that losetup and hence mount which uses losetup to do loopback mounting, allow you to specify an offset option to specify the starting offset into the file from which to read. Now the only trick is to use fdisk to figure out where the partitions are:

User Mode Linux: SKAS0 poorly documented

It's unfortunate that SKAS0 mode is poorly documented on the User Mode Linux (UML) web site. For example, this page about SKAS doesn't mention it. It is explained in Jeff Dike's UML book though.

I wish they would update the UML web site as it gives the impression that TT and SKAS3 are the only choices, which is no longer true, as SKAS0 was added to the kernel in version 2.6.13.