Baslinux mailing list

[James Miller <jamtat AT mailsnare.net>]

On Fri, 24 Feb 2006, David Moberg wrote:

> You ran out of loop devices. Did you umount the -o loop mounts?
> umount is supposed to free the loop device for the next use, but
> it won't if it is sufficiently confused by the chroot.
>
> The loop module ordinarily supports 8 loop devices - mknod
> loop6 and loop7 (from implied major and minor numbers of the
> previous 5 or 6) if you don't have them. loop.o accepts the
> max_loop argument to increase the number of total loop
> devices when you insert it.
>
> > kill -9 number does not work.
>
> The loops are still in use. Try busybox umount or figure out how
> to get SW umount to realize that it is supposed to free the loop
> devices when it is done with them. rmmod loop when they are
> free to kill loop.

I had this same problem of running out of loop devices on a much newer 
Linux distro.  That resulted from using qemu alot.  Somehow, the loop 
devices weren't being freed up after quitting qemu or umounting other loop 
devices manually.  I added a line to a startup script that gave me 64 
extra loop devices, which helped.  But I have still run out of loop 
devices subsequently, and have had to reboot in order to use qemu.  It 
looks like sort of buggy behavior, doesn't it?

James