vote for Lilo

[jdow]

From: "Philip Pokorny" <ppokorny at penguincomputing.com>

> > Message: 14 Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 13:23:50 -0700
>  > From: Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com>
>  > To: fedora-test-list at redhat.com
>  > Subject: Re: vote for Lilo
>  > Reply-To: fedora-test-list at redhat.com
>  >
>  > Samuel Flory wrote:
> >
> >> Gordon Messmer wrote:
> >>> Don't put /boot on a RAID partition... simple.  I don't believe that
> >>> either Grub or LILO are going to work reliably on any RAID type other
> >>> than RAID 1.
> >>
> >>    Lilo in RH 9 works great on RAID1 arrays.
> >
> > That's what I said.  Either Grub or LILO should work on RAID 1, but I
> > don't believe that either will work with RAID 0 or 5.
> >
> >> Unlike with grub the RH 9
> >> installer installed lilo to both drives.
> >
> > How'd it do that?  I confess that I've not used RH 9 with LILO, but I'm
> > not aware of any special directives that would make that work.  Lilo,
> > like grub is normally installed to the MBR of a drive.  RAID devices
> > will not include that, so perhaps you installed to the superblock of
> > your partition?  That should work with both grub and LILO, but both will
> > need another boot loader on the MBR to chain boot them from their
> > location at the superblock on the RAID partition.
>
> LILO doesn't require any special directives.  It sees your /boot is a
> RAID-1 mirror and installs to the MBR of each disk with a member of the
> RAID set automatically.
>
> Looking at the output of 'lilo -v -v -v' I would say that it *could*
> even handle different geometries and offsets of the RAID partitions on
> each drive.  It builds a map for each drive and installs lilo with it's
> map into the MBR of each disk.  It's a bit of a pain and very confusing
> to create such a config though, so I haven't personally tried it.
>
> If it weren't for BugID 39365 (a silly typo that *really* should be fixed)
>
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=39365
>
> LILO would effortlessly handle as many drives as you want.  I've
> personally built systems with 6 drives in a RAID1 mirror (6 copies of
> the same data).  Both SCSI and IDE work equally well.
>
> That suffices to load the vmlinuz and initrd.
>
> That together with partition type FD (RAID autodetect) is a wonder to
> behold.  It's cool to see Linux find and reconstruct all the RAID sets
> even after you re-arrange the drives in any order.
>
> And LILO does it all automatically.

And if you have a script for your compiles you can make the lilo run
happen at the end of a successful compile all nice and automatically.
The more sophisticated the script the easier the job.

{^_-}