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On the topic of cloop, any idea why it never made it to mainline? Its hugely useful in itself, and I use it for some custom boot images built with buildroot, but it breaks on nearly every kernel upgrade. Also finding the latest cloop source always feels like a treasurehunt.

Everytime I ask about cloop in mainline, I get told to switch to squashfs - which is fine, just that cloop has uses well outside squashfs' domain.

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I guess one answer is just that we never tried, and the kernel was stable enough during the time that we were releasing our distribution that I think we only needed a total of one patch from Rusty and/or from Klaus Knopper. Presumably it would (just) have needed someone to be willing to maintain it in the kernel at the time.

One element of this is that cloop was, quite literally, a quick hack (I think Rusty wrote the original version in a single day), which then worked incredibly well for our use case.

Sorry about that.

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