It lets you mount a file as a filesystem, instead of an actual hardware device. I think it's called "loopback" because instead of reading from /dev/whatever it

It lets you mount a file as a filesystem, instead of an actual hardware device. I think it's called "loopback" because instead of reading from /dev/whatever it loops back to /dev/original and reads the specified file. See the man page for `mount`: https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount https://linux.die.net/man/8/mount (search for "loop")