Interview with FOSDEM team about nbdkit loop mounting

I did an email interview which you can read online about my FOSDEM talk about nbdkit loop mounting.

Other FOSDEM 2019 interviews are here.

nbdkit / FOSDEM test presentation about better loop mounts for Linux

I’ve submitted a talk about nbdkit, our flexible pluggable NBD server, to FOSDEM next February. This is going to be about using NBD as a better way to do loop mounts in Linux.

In preparation I gave a very early version of the talk to a small Red Hat audience.

Video link: http://oirase.annexia.org/rwmj.wp.com/rjones-nbdkit-tech-talk-2018-11-19.mp4

Sorry about the slow start. You may want to skip to 2 mins to get past the intro.

Summary of what’s in the talk:

1. Demo of regular, plain loop mounting.
2. Demo of loop mounting an XZ-compressed disk image using NBD + nbdkit.
3. Slides about how loop device compares to NBD.
4. Slides about nbdkit plugins and filters.
5. Using VMware VDDK to access a VMDK file.
6. Creating a giant disk costing EUR 300 million(!)
7. Visualizing a single filesystem.
8. Visualizing RAID 5.
9. Writing a plugin in shell script (live demo).
10. Summary.