Re: LILO

[Daniel Stone <daniel@kabuki.openfridge.net>]

On Thu, May 10, 2001 at 04:09:10PM +0100, Frederico Mu?oz wrote:
> Ummm... ina all this I was trying to found a reason for LILO to be the 
> default bootloader... every reason
> I could see appears to be invalid, but there is probably a big one out 
> there that I'm missing utterly...

Tradition, and the fact lilo will boot over software RAID, SCSI drives with
no BIOS, etc? (OTOH, GRUB *does* netboot and multiboot). The reason is this:
	* GRUB provides few drivers
	* GRUB reads the config file and the kernel off the partition, at
	  boot time
So, if GRUB doesn't have a driver for <foo> BIOS-less SCSI card (and it
won't), you won't be able to boot off it. Ditto software RAID, you can't
boot from that, because GRUB doesn't support md/LVM support, if you want
that you'll have to use LILO, because it writes the entire boot sector, etc,
from inside Linux.

Personally, I prefer GRUB, but I can see why LILO is used in some
circumstances.

d

PS, the documentation (or lack thereof) for GRUB was absolutely awful when I
last checked, has it gotten any better?

-- 
Daniel Stone
daniel@kabuki.openfridge.net