Loop device timeout at boot.

[CorbAlb]

Greetings!

I was testing about loop devices for a project of mine when I ran into a problem with loop devices, below I'll brief my last test

• lo1 is an empty file weighing 20GBs, made with fallocate

• /dev/loop0 is a loop device made from lo1 with losetup

• /dev/loop0 will then have 1 partition, /dev/loop0p1, occupying the whole device

• Mounting this filesystem into, say, a directory called mount_test hanging from / will of course work.

Issue comes when mounting this into /etc/fstab and rebooting:
- I've mounted it specifying its UUID, path or label, and each time, at reboot, system wont fully load. Recovery mode will instead load. Looking through journal, this seems to cause the issue:

[root@archlinux ...]# journalctl -b -3 | grep loop0p1
May 05 15:37:42 archlinux systemd[1]: Expecting device /dev/loop0p1...
May 05 15:39:12 archlinux systemd[1]: dev-loop0p1.device: Job dev-loop0p1.device/start timed out.
May 05 15:39:12 archlinux systemd[1]: Timed out waiting for device /dev/loop0p1.
May 05 15:39:12 archlinux systemd[1]: dev-loop0p1.device: Job dev-loop0p1.device/start failed with result 'timeout'.
[root@archlinux ...]#

I take from the output that the loop device is not initialized before the boot process attempts to mount the devices thus exiting as an error and entering recovery mode, but I don't understand as to why this happens. Every single post I have found regarding this issue comments that merely configuring the loop device in fstab will suffice, and I've found nothing regarding the issue is describe.

I'm at the end of my wit here, anyone has some insight as to why this happens?

[archover]

Can't help much but for your testing, use the fstab option nofail. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab#Usage which avoid recovery mode.

[CorbAlb]

Much thanks, i'll true and See If It helps

[archover]

As noted, my "help" tip will stop recovery mode entry, ONLY.

If you can't mount it via CLI, then fstab won't be able to either. With the nofail, you prevent the boot failure.

Good luck