We create a zero filled file for use as a loopback device for the Swift storage backend. Here we use the disk copy command to create a file named swift-disk and allocate a million 1KiB blocks (976.56 MiB) to it. So we have a loopback disk of approximately 1GiB. We can increase this size by modifying the seek value. The disk is then formated to XFS filesystem. The file command can be used to verify if it worked.
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/srv/swift-disk bs=1024 count=0 seek=1000000 sudo mkfs.xfs -i size=1024 /srv/swift-disk file /srv/swift-disk swift-disk1: SGI XFS filesystem data (blksz 4096, inosz 1024, v2 dirs)
Create a directory /mnt/swift_backend that can be used as a mount point to the partion tha we created.
sudo mkdir /mnt/swift_backend
Make it mount on boot by appending this to /etc/fstab.
/srv/swift-disk /mnt/swift_backend xfs loop,noatime,nodiratime,nobarrier,logbufs=8 0 0
