Where to find mountlo?

[bendavis78]

Your documentation refers to mountlo, but I can't seem to find a version that works. The binary version on sourceforge appears to be broken, as performing any operations within the filesystem cause my session to lock up. I can't seem to compile from source as the Makefile refers to explicit linux and fuse versions.

Is there an alternative to mountlo that can be used to mount disk images in userspace?

[jmattsson]

It's been a while since I used mountlo now. As of a couple of years ago the sourceforge 0.6 source built and worked fine. I remember having some headaches getting it to build initially, but it didn't take too much to get it going. That was then, of course. I've been hoping someone would resume maintenance on it - it's such a useful utility!

Sorry I can't be of more help here.

[probonopd]

When I compile the contents of this github project, I get a binary called fuseloop which I suppose should do the same thing?

It's not very verbose about what it does though:

me@host:~/fuseloop$ ./fuseloop -h
syntax: ./fuseloop [options] <src_file> <mount_file>
options:
    -h  --help      print help
    -V  --version   print version
    -O <bytes>      src_file offset in bytes
    -S <bytes>      size in bytes available from offset
    -r              read only
    -w              read write (default)
    -o <option(s)>  mount options
    -d              enable debug output

[probonopd]

Compiled on Ubuntu like this:

sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev
gcc fuseloop.c -o fuseloop -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64  -I/usr/include/fuse/ -lfuse
strip fuseloop

But now how do I loop-mount an ISO?

[refi64]

Trying to find a copy of mountlo somewhere...is it still available? @jmattsson Do you have a link?

[jmattsson]

Unfortunately it seems to have been discontinued. When I last tried compiling it I was hitting enough errors that I gave up for then. Poking around the net, it would appear you can still find the source bundles e.g. here, including a pre-compiled version for i386 (scroll down to "mountlo"). To the best of my knowledge, 0.6 was the last version. If someone can dust off mountlo and bring it into the modern age, I'd love to hear about it! :)

[refi64]

@jmattsson Thanks!!

[helamonster]

Cool, I never knew about mountlo.
I've just been using fusefat https://sourceforge.net/p/fusefat/wiki/Home/ (FUSE module for FAT filesystems) or other FUSE modules https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/wiki/Filesystems.

[jrwwallis]

fuse2fs from e2fsprogs works well for ext{2,3,4} partitions.
http://e2fsprogs.sourceforge.net/

[timmattison]

I'm about to submit a PR so you can build this with Docker if you want to use fuseloop.

[timmattison]

Oops, guess I didn't understand that. Oh well, at least now I can easily build fuseloop with Docker on my Mac now.

[timmattison]

I found the source for mountlo at this URL - http://ftp.vim.org/ftp/pub/ftp/os/Linux/distr/slitaz/sources/packages-cooking/m/ - after poking around for a bit. I bet I could get that into a Docker container too. The license isn't compatible with yours though. Where would something like this live?

[jmattsson]

If you can get it to build, fork it to a new repo on your github and add the Docker build capability :)

[sskras]

mountlo seems to use UML internally. Quoting https://lwn.net/Articles/173617/:

From: Miklos Szeredi <miklos(at)szeredi.hu>
Subject: [Announce] mountlo 0.5 - Loopback mounting in userspace
Date: Mon, 27 Feb 2006 16:10:38 +0100

I'm proud to announce a new version of my pet project 'mountlo', a
utility which works similarly to 'mount -o loop', but the filesystem
runs entirely in userspace.

While arguably it is quite useless, I like it because it combines some
of my favorite technologies (Linux, UML and FUSE) with very little
additional glue code.

Features:

 o safe mounting of filesystem images for unprivileged users
 o all disk-filesystem types supported in a single binary

So I guess eiter the glue got broken or the UML subsystem is missing (in most of running kernels these days).