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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