dm-loop patch dropped?

[Colin Ian King]

On Thu, 2010-02-04 at 17:14 -0800, Stefan Bader wrote:
> Tim Gardner wrote:
> > Hadmut Danisch wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I was looking for a solution for ubuntu bug #500331. A dmsetup command
> >> that use to work well in jaunty does not work in karmic
> >> anymore. Redhat's developers of the dmsetup command told me, that
> >> these commands depend on the dm-loop patch for the linux kernel, which
> >> was not yet accepted into the main stream kernel. It seems as if these
> >> patches had been applied to jaunty kernels (and maybe older ubuntu
> >> versions), but are not applied to karmic anymore. 
> >>
> >> Has the functionality been dropped intentionally?
> >>
> >>
> >> regards
> >> Hadmut
> >>
> > 
> > Yes - dm-loop was removed from Karmic. We've been doing a better job 
> > lately of remembering why we made config decisions, but dm-loop appears 
> > to have been deleted (by yours truly) without the decision having been 
> > documented. I imagine it was because we thought it was unused, bad code, 
> > not in the upstream kernel, or some combination of the above excuses.
> > 
> > rtg
> 
> There has been some notes on
> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/specs/KernelKarmicReviewOfNonUpstreamedCode
> by which it was removed afterwe have been told it only had been used by WUBI but
> that would not need it any longer.
> 
> -Stefan
> 
If I can recall correctly, the original intention was to see if it
helped Wubi boot speeds, but I believe Wubi didn't pick it up close to
the final release (due to various last minute issues) and it was too
late to drop Wubi at that point.

Colin