mdaffin
Investigate loopfs
Seems there is a new way to interact with loop devices, in particular private loop devices via mounting loopfs to some location. From a quick glance it looks like you can have different locations for loop-control and loop* devices other than /dev. Maybe this is what android is doing under the hood? We might need a more generic approach then the swapping out the LOOP_PREFIX depending on the target.
https://lwn.net/Articles/819625/
Looks like it has been implemented, and been discussed but is not close to being mainlined yet. Which basically means we cannot yet use it for testing. However that article does suggest loop device usage by unprivileged users which would help a lot with the testing issues we are facing. If/when this makes it into mainline it seems like a viable option to use. However we will see how long that will take.