THE LOOP DEVICE
One further possible type is a mount via the loop device. For example, the command
mount /tmp/fdimage /mnt -t msdos -o loop=/dev/loop3,blocksize=1024
will set up the loop device /dev/loop3 to correspond to the file /tmp/fdimage, and then mount this device on /mnt.
This type of mount knows about three options, namely loop, offset and encryption, that are really options to los-
etup(8). If no explicit loop device is mentioned (but just an option ‘-o loop’ is given), then mount will try to
find some unused loop device and use that. If you are not so unwise as to make /etc/mtab a symbolic link to
/proc/mounts then any loop device allocated by mount will be freed by umount. You can also free a loop device by
hand, using ‘losetup -d’, see losetup(8).