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Why do the Linux examples for LUKS/dm-crypt volumes show “losetup” being used twice?

April 26, 2017dm-crypt examples linux losetup luks twice Used

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Why do the Linux examples for LUKS/dm-crypt volumes show “losetup” being used twice?

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This actually has nothing to do with FreeOTFE(!), but appears to be an oddity with “mkdosfs”/dm-crypt. Although this section of the documentation shows: losetup /dev/loop1 /dev/mapper/myMapper mkdosfs /dev/loop1 you should be able to simply use: mkdosfs /dev/mapper/myMapper However, when this section of the documentation was written and tested (under Fedora Core 3, with a v2.6.11.7 kernel installed and using cryptsetup-luks v1.0), this shorter (and more sensible) version resulted in mkdosfs generating the following error: # mkdosfs /dev/mapper/myMapper mkdosfs 2.8 (28 Feb 2001) mkdosfs: unable to get drive geometry for ‘/dev/mapper/myMapper’ YMMV, though you may well find that formatting the volume with a different filesystem will remove the “double loop” issue.