On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 05:31 -0500, Douglas McClendon wrote:
Jeremy recently committed a patch which changed the number of loop
devices created from 128 to 16. I don't know if there was some
measurable performance reason for this or not.
There's some impact with udev startup. And Harald asked nicely :)
I had always guessed
that the reason David chose such a large number originally was because
of the fact that unlike in a normal system, in a LiveOS system, a loop
device is used for the rootfs, and therefore the loop driver can never
be removed and readded with a larger number of devices if needed.
I thought it was just that he liked big numbers :-)
This patch adds an optional kernel commandline parameter
num_loopdevs=<int> which will cause that many loop devices to be created
instead of the default of 16. This will be useful for people using the
livecd who need lots of loop devices, but doesn't interfere with
whatever reasons justified the lowering from 128 to 16.
I'd rather go with using loop.max_loop as the option. My reason being
that we want to get to where modprobe will look at things
from /proc/cmdline and pass options in general with the same syntax as
if the module were compiled into the kernel. I don't think that work
will get done for F8, but this way, we're already using the syntax that
we'll want for the future.
Jeremy