id	summary	reporter	owner	description	type	status	priority	milestone	component	version	resolution	keywords	cc
59	losetup sucks	price	price	"Currently sipb-xen-lvcopy (part of the cloning autoinstaller), in order to mount filesystems located in partitions inside the LVs that are our disk images, uses losetup -o to make loopback devices that mirror the LV devices with an offset.

Unfortunately losetup seems to be impossible to use reliably -- the resulting devices are taken from a small fixed namespace, and there's no way to grab one atomically.  (Rather, there is a way called losetup -f, but you can either find out a free name or bind to it -- not both!)  The current code uses a lock so that different invocations of sipb-xen-lvcopy won't collide, but we have to cross our fingers that no other program touches /dev/loop32 through /dev/loop59, the arbitrary range I chose.

It'd be good to fix this, but it's probably hopeless and probably won't bite us anyway.  Unless I'm missing something and it's easy.
"	defect	closed	trivial	Version 2.0	autoinstallers		wontfix