Re: Considerations for lilo removal

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

William Pitcock <nenolod@sacredspiral.co.uk> writes:

> Hi,
>
> I am wondering if it is a good idea to remove lilo entirely. At the
> moment, lilo has been pulled from testing, and the code is in a shape
> where a grave bug (bug #479607) is unlikely fixable without severe
> refactoring of the codebase.

I don't really see this as a bug, certainly not as grave. The problem
seems to be that lilo simply can't handle large images and the default
ramdisk just has now hit that limit on amd64. The only bug there is
imho is that the condition does not get detected and reported
properly (patched lilo shoud be on mentors).

The simple solution to is to not stuff so many modules into the
initramfs. Using only needed modules reduces my initramfs by a factor
of 3. So there is still a big margin for growth.

And there are systems where grub simply doesn't work for some screwed
up reason or another and a lot of people that prefer it. Removing it
just because it has an avoidable size limit seems like a bad idea.

> With grub being stable and grub2 approaching stability itself, do we
> really need lilo anymore? It's not even installed by default anymore,
> and the only systems I have that are still on lilo are installations of
> Debian I have had since Woody.
>
> It seems like moving to grub for everything may be a good choice on the
> archs where lilo is used.
>
> If we do not need lilo, then I will file a RM bug in the next couple of
> weeks.
>
> William

MfG
        Goswin