LILO vs. GRUB

Posted Jun 17, 2004 8:52 UTC (Thu) by Klavs (guest, #10563)
Parent article: LILO vs. GRUB

While Grub is a very nice bootloader - I really like that I have it on my RIP bootcd - so I can boot discs, that some old bios can't handle - because the discs were suddenly moved (or new controllers were added to the mix) - I prefer LILO for servers - simply because of two things:

1) it forces you to verify the config - before the change is implemented. (GRUB just reads the config on boot - and if its buggy - you're out of luck on a remote system).

2) LILO supports the -R option - which I use to test kernels, of which I'm not a 100% will boot - this way all I have to do - is to repower the server (which you can get even a monkey to do - and on IBM systems, can be done by "dialing up" to the ASMA processor :)

to post comments

dual boot

Posted Jun 17, 2004 9:56 UTC (Thu) by grmd (guest, #4391) [Link] (3 responses)

The -R command line option is also very useful when you have a dual boot system, for quick shutdown from one system (e.g. Linux) to reboot into another (e.g. Windows) without the timed out delay waiting for the user to select which system to boot.

dual boot

Posted Jun 17, 2004 10:30 UTC (Thu) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (2 responses)

There's a patch out there somewhere that allows to do this with grub. From the changelog of the Fedora Core 2 rpm:

"- add patch from GRUB mailing list from Keir Fraser to add a --once flag to
savedefault function so that you can have the equivalent of lilo -R
functionality (use 'savedefault --default=N --once' from the grub shell)"

dual boot

Posted Jun 17, 2004 14:32 UTC (Thu) by plars (guest, #7736) [Link] (1 responses)

That's great to hear that someone is actually thinking about doing this... but a patch out there doesn't help me. Until that patch is in mainline grub code and present in all major distros, grub is completely useless to me.

I do a lot of automated testing, sometimes on machines that take a long time to boot. Without the -R (or equivilent option) all of my time would be used by standing around waiting on a LOT of individual machines to get to a boot loader prompt so that I could select the right kernel. Not all of us boot a kernel expecting or hoping for it to work. :)

dual boot

Posted Jun 17, 2004 15:33 UTC (Thu) by nstraz (guest, #1592) [Link]

I do a lot of automated testing too and I find that LILO is better in that environment. Being able to add another kernel image easily to the config file and setting LILO to boot it is invaluable. As far as I've seen, doing that with GRUB is tricky. If I could specify the default kernel to boot by name instead of by number, I'd probably start using GRUB.

LILO vs. GRUB

Posted Jun 17, 2004 14:12 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872) [Link] (1 responses)

Unattended kernel upgrades make me very nervous, but with some extra hardware on the server, GRUB makes the process bearable. My remote server is connected to a terminal server on the serial port, and GRUB is configured to talk to the serial port rather than the console. With the addition of a network-controlled power switch, I can easily reboot the system and change the boot configuration any way I need to. Were I to use LILO, my only recourse for a bootloader screw-up would be to boot from a rescue disk, which is difficult to do without physical access to the machine...

LILO vs. GRUB

Posted Jun 17, 2004 18:02 UTC (Thu) by plars (guest, #7736) [Link]

Additional hardware is a nuisance when there's a solution (lilo) that doesn't require it. However, when you multiply that by hundreds, possibly thousands of diverse test machines, some of which do not even have a serial port in the traditional sense, it becomes downright impossible to do what you are describing.

As for screwing up your boot configuration, I really like lilo better hear too. It's a lot easier to shoot yourself in the foot with grub since (as has already been pointed out) there's nothing that runs after a modification to validate you didn't put a typo in your kernel image name. The other nice thing is that lilo shows you what you selected as the default when you run lilo, so if you screwed up and forgot to change your default when you intended to, you know it before you reboot. Recovery with a boot cd has never been a problem for me in the past, whereas remembering which drive has my kernel on it with so many different machines can be problematic. Grub has a long way to go before I would consider using it, though I like the concept of grub and hope that they can implement these simple features before long.