Quote Originally Posted by krishna.murphy View Post
I don't think Klaus would have become the maintainer of cloop for anything less than a substantial reason; too much work for no real benefit. I don't know what that reason is, but I know it must exist.
That's what we call "belief", it's not based on facts.
I think it's all historical. Cloop existed long time ago. Klaus is not the creator. He is just the maintainer. He needed it at that moment. So now nobody else except him has "vested" interest in it. He is using it simply because he is familiar with it. Kind of sentimental value thingie. As a matter of fact, it's a easy swap to use squashfs.

The "phantom GB of ramdisk" aspect of cloop is probably intentional, perhaps to make possible very fast growth of the actual filesystem, or some such.
I believe that you said this because you did not look at the code. The ram disk has nothing to do with cloop. The ram disk is created for unionsfs with cloop, to allow users to have write access to the otherwise read-only cloop. And it's left mounted unused when the user has a persistent store. If you look at the code you will agree with me, it's a bug.