Re: reasons to ditch LILO before upgrading to jessie?
On Thu, Jul 7, 2016, at 10:57, Giovanni Gigante wrote:
>
> At the end, I decided to try the upgrade to jessie with LiLo (24.1) in
> place. I thought that the probability of hitting some bug caused by the
> interaction between LiLo and the upgraded distribution was less than the
> probabily of causing some damage by switching the bootloader (for
> example, by messing up the RAID configuration) since I've never
> configured Grub before. Also, the golden heuristic of "if it ain't
> broke, don't fix it", and the fact that this particular Debian upgrade
> is also switching from the init scripts to systemd, so I did not want to
> introduce even more changes in the boot process for the moment.
>
> Apparently, it worked.
>
I never doubted that it would. I still use LILO with the latest jessie
kernels.
I maintain a web page for Debian users who use LILO, or who are thinking
of switching from GRUB to LILO:
http://www.stevesdebianstuff.org/lilo.htm
I don't address the issue of software RAID though. I've never tried it.
I have used LILO with hardware RAID. It works just fine. I'm using it
right now as I write this.
As far as LILO being unmaintained is concerned, I wouldn't be too concerned
about that. I've been thinking about offering to maintain it myself. I haven't
heard from Joachim lately. Maybe I'll drop him another line.
The three main things I like about LILO are (1) I understand how it works,
(2) it is easy to configure, and (3) it doesn't use any unallocated sectors.
The main limitations to LILO's future viability, as I see it, are UEFI
and GPT. LILO is heavily dependent on the traditional BIOS. Most UEFI
systems have a CSM to provide a BIOS for forward compatibility, though it
is often disabled by default. But some of the newest systems are starting
to ship with no CSM. I won't buy one of those as long as I have a choice.
And GPT is needed to break the 2 TiB disk size limit. But none of my disks
are anywhere near that big.
If your system has a BIOS and a traditional DOS-style partition table,
there's no reason not to use LILO, unless you just don't want to.
--
.''`. Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@fastmail.com>
: :' :
`. `'`
`-
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