Re: GRUB OR LILO?
On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 2:24 AM, Alex PADOLY <alex.padoly@gmx.fr> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> For a server that works permanently with DEBIAN SQUEEZE, I used LILO in
> kernel compilation and with and scsi isa card.
> Why many of LINUX distribution choose GRUB?
> I don't know that I must choose.
>
> Thank you.
> Alex
>
There are a big, big stack of reasons. Once grub is installed, you can
edit grub.conf and don't have to "re-install" it in the boot loader,
This is an *enormous* stability advantage: various changes of system
configuration and kernel changes can re-arrange your drives, and
having to figure out which one gets the boot loader with the new
ordering is incredibly painful.
LILO's old limitations to having your "/boot" partition contained
entirely in the first 8 Gig of disk was also a big issue with
dual-boot or larger drived systems where a single "/" partition was
preferable. Grub does not have this issue.
Also, LILO had a maximum character length in the label naming. (15
characters?) This prevented saying "kernel 2.4.37 with NFS tested", or
"kernel 2.6.100 with USB3 testing" in the label names, and made life
very hard for developers who were chewing through dozens of kernels in
a very small amount of time.
The *only* thing I miss from LILO is the "Set your default kernel from
the command line" option, followed with the "Reboot once only with an
alternative kernel". It saved my ass when a whole stack of new
hardware had newer hard drives unsupported by a production kernel, and
they all failed to reboot with the "upgrade" to the production kernel,
rather than using the operating system's bog-standard kernel. (This
was a Red Hat release, not Debian, but the issues applied.)
That sort of thing was also why I loathe kernel, and Apache, and Perl
maintainers who think "oh, let's just stick with the old version,
we'll backport changes if and as we need them" and refuse to update to
the version published with their OS. The integration issues bite you
at bad, bad, bad moments.
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