Re: lilo removal in squeeze (or, "please test grub2")

[Stephen Powell <zlinuxman@wowway.com>]

On Sat, 29 May 2010 14:40:41 -0400 (EDT), Andreas Barth wrote:
> Stephen Powell wrote:
>> On Sat, 22 May 2010 23:39:52 -0400 (EDT), William Pitcock wrote:
>>> After some discussion about lilo on #debian-devel in IRC, it has pretty
>>> much been determined that kernel sizes have crossed the line past where
>>> lilo can reliably determine the payload size.
>>
>
> We're speaking about #505609 I assume?

I hope not.  Strictly speaking, 505609 is not a lilo bug.  The key is
that he was still able to boot his old kernel that had been de-installed.
That's a sure sign that lilo's map installer did not get run during the
kernel upgrade process.  It used to be that if

   do_bootloader = yes

was specified in /etc/kernel-img.conf that installing a new kernel would
cause lilo to be run.  That is no longer the case.  "update-initramfs -u ..." 
will cause lilo to be run if this option is set; but "update-initramfs -c ..."
(or mkinitramfs ...) which is what is run during installation of a new kernel,
will not.  I have created my own hook script to fix that problem on my system.
Strangely, though, "do_bootloader = yes" in /etc/kernel-img.conf still
causes zipl to be run during kernel installation on the s390 platform.
Something must have changed in the kernel maintainer script or in
update-initramfs that causes the lilo map installer to not be run anymore
under conditions that used to cause it to be run.

Look carefully at the console log.  There is no output from the map installer
until he manually runs lilo.  He apparently thinks that running lilo from
the command line simply lists the installed kernels.  No.  Running lilo
from the command line is what fixed the problem.

If there's a bug here, it's somewhere else in the kernel installation
process, not in lilo itself.  If this so-called bug in lilo is what
prompted the decision to drop lilo, then the decision was based on bad data.
lilo, at least in this case, is working as designed.  The problem is that
the lilo map installer did not get run during the kernel installation
process.  I've helped a number of people on debian-user with problems
like this, and in every case so far running lilo at the command line
fixed the problem.

-- 
  .''`.     Stephen Powell    
 : :'  :
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