What Are All These Loop Devices? (Ubuntu/Snap Users Often Ask This.)

What are loop devices? This is a question that comes up a lot these days, especially from Ubuntu users. This is due to the fact that Snap packages are mounted as loop devices.

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[Danielddiniz]

Appreciate your passion explaining concepts to the community DT, you’re so nice 👍🏼!

[scottb]

DT, I was thinking while I was watching this video. ( Which is very good. Perfect for my level. ) That you spoke about other viewers in a previous video had told you that you would be great doing voice work. I agree. You should seek out an agent involved with radio and television. One of my employees when I was a technical director at a large regional childrens theater, worked as voice over for local TV and radio as well as working as a scenic painter. She made more with the voice over work. Its out there, even in Louisiana. This was twnety years ago in Birmingham AL. Im sure you would get some offers. Thanks for all of the videos you make . You have taught me alot. Hopefully this finds you well and you can profit from it.

[thingsiplay]

The loop-devices is actually one of the reasons I switched away from Ubuntu. Every time I wanted to do something to backup or anything with my hard drives, list or whatever, these loop-devices always spammed my workflow. And Ubuntu going harder and more on Snaps, this would become more and more of a problem for me.

[GioGziro]

Derek, I think you missed the core reason why loop devices are useful.

There is almost no benefit of using loop devices instead of just mounting the filesystem from the image directly if the file is a partition image and contains a valid filesystem. After all, block devices are also files in Unix and it works the same way for ordinary files as well.

But the full disk images are trickier. On Linux, udev automatically creates device files for the individual partitions (sda1, sda2, sdb1, nvme0n1p1, mmcblk0p1, etc.), but there is no equivalent functionality for disk images by default, so you can't mount partitions when they are inside a disk image. One way to get around this is to create a loop device with the offset of that specific partition you want to mount using with _-o_ option and then mounting the loop device — just like as you mount a partition.

[enderprism]

Thanks for the explanation, I always wondered what they were doing 😀

[he]

Should do an video on how Linux boots from power button to graphical application

[BradleyBrown]

Thanks for doing this, it was very educational!

[kipchickensout]

I would've thought that it would be permanent, so it's good that you "diverged" and went over that as well

[itildude]

I must be missing something but I just don't see the architectural need for Snap to use loop devices. Segregation can be achieved without it which seems more logical, but maybe that's just me.

[PabloBianchiOK]

Flatpak is also sandboxed and doesn't uses loop devices. How? Why?

[theodorealenas]

I immediately stopped watching and went on to try the commands, all in /tmp because I'm scared. I'm so glad you accidentally went over them! I put stuff in my image file and mounted and unmount it over and over

[jimmyrichards]

Have a Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year!
🎅💫

[eskrest]

This is incredible. So basically I can make a file and mount it as a virtual drive, use it to store data and then copy it on a new system? Copying just one file takes much less time, and I could use this method for my /home directory. This way I can take it anywhere. I could put in on a flash drive and copy to a new system and mout it there

[temari]

I see that there are no snaps defined in fstab. Does that mean that snap system has separate tools to auto mount your snaps?

[DarkCookie]

You can install so many programms that never need loop devices and then theres snap that uses them for stuff like a calculator. I think less people would complain about that if it was actually needed and not just spam when you run lsblk.

[MerkDolf]

Hey DT enjoy your content please don't quit your day job!

[linuxstreamer]

i don't have any snaps because flatpaks do what i want them to also not a fan of snaps but if you want to use them that is fine

[swimfan]

I hope u have a video on interactive shell setup, auto completion.. i need that

[nomaddemon]

they also polute gparted, iam not sure where root is when i see like 12 devices on single partition.

i would happily use snaps on server, just.. get rid of this loop devices plz

[leksmut]

What if a loop devices limit achieved then new snap installation will fail?