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Bug#515695: installation-reports: USB Install fails when too many ISOs are found



reassign 515695 linux-2.6
retitle 515695 too small maximum loop devices
clone 515695 -1
reassign -1 iso-scan
retitle -1 should warn user if more then 8 isos are available
thanks

Rohan Dhruva <rohandhruva@gmail.com> writes:

[...]

> My /dev/hda5 is a vfat partition having many (upwards of 15) ISOs. They
> are all present in a single directory in the root, so debian installer
> did check them. Reading the syslog shows that the installer checks every
> ISO for presence of "debianness". However, after checking a few ISOs, it
> started failing. The error provided was "unable to mount iso XXX".
> Because of this, the kde CD iso found on /dev/sda1 (my pen drive) also
> failed to mount. No reason for failure of mounting of the ISOs was
> given. I switched to vt2, and tried to manually mount a random ISO. The
> error given at that time was "Cannot setup loop device: no such file or
> directory".

[...]

,----[ Linux kernel source at 'drivers/block/loop.c' ]
|...
| static int __init loop_init(void)
| {
|         int i, nr;
|         unsigned long range;
|         struct loop_device *lo, *next;
| 
|         /*
|          * loop module now has a feature to instantiate underlying device
|          * structure on-demand, provided that there is an access dev node.
|          * However, this will not work well with user space tool that doesn't
|          * know about such "feature".  In order to not break any existing
|          * tool, we do the following:
|          *
|          * (1) if max_loop is specified, create that many upfront, and this
|          *     also becomes a hard limit.
|          * (2) if max_loop is not specified, create 8 loop device on module
|          *     load, user can further extend loop device by create dev node
|          *     themselves and have kernel automatically instantiate actual
|          *     device on-demand.
|          */
|...
`----

As you can see at this snip of kernel source, if not specified you can
only create up to 8 loop devices. So we can only deal with 8 isos.

I've cloned the bug report to iso-scan since it could warn the user in
this case making easier to detect the problem and explaning it to
him/her.

Cheers,

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