OSDev.org

One of the reasons I switched from Windows to Linux was to be able to use mount, and generally be able to deal with devices properly. For OS development, however, this still isn't enough; it doesn't let you mount eg. a VDI disk image from VirtualBox. I found that QEMU had a rather useful tool called qemu-nbd, which would let you bind a disk image to a block device, with all the partitions available as block devices as well, which is what I wanted. But qemu-nbd has to be run as root, and you can't be sure of the name of the block device in advance, which makes it tricky to use in a Makefile. So, a few months ago I wrote nbd-bind, a wrapper around qemu-nbd to solve these problems, and I've finally got round to releasing it.

The source is available on GitHub: https://github.com/mark-raymond/nbd-bind, and there's more info there about how it works, along with an example of how it can be used in a Makefile.

The general usage is like this: which will make disk-image.vdi available as a block device called device-name, and its partitions available as block devices called device-name-p1, device-name-p2 etc. Once you're finished, you just run: I hope that this is of some use to the OSDev community, and any feedback - on the code, the (minimal) docs, or the general premise - would be appreciated!