Re: GRUB vs LILO
Craig Dickson <crdic@pacbell.net> writes:
> David Roundy wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Aug 05, 2002 at 02:54:14PM +0200, Romuald DELAVERGNE wrote:
>>
>> > I think GRUB is better.
>> > Its only disadvantage compared to lilo, it is that it is filesystem
>> > dependant.
>>
>> Interestingly, in my opinion this is also its biggest advantage. I like
>> knowing that I can boot from any kernel I want to, regardless of whether I
>> told grub about it prior to rebooting.
>
> Pardon the dumb question, but what do you mean by "filesystem-dependent"?
When you run LILO, it figures out where on the disk the kernel is
physically located and writes that address into its boot block. This
means that if you install a new kernel, you need to remember to re-run
LILO, and it can't do anything with kernels it doesn't know about.
GRUB, by contrast, is clueful about several sorts of filesystems
(notably including ext2/ext3). So you can put an item in
/boot/grub/menu.lst saying "boot /vmlinuz on this partition", and GRUB
will search through the filesystem to find the kernel. This means
that you don't need to reinstall GRUB just because you have a new
kernel, and it's fairly easy to boot older kernels you just happen to
have laying around.
--
David Maze dmaze@debian.org http://people.debian.org/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
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