LILO vs. GRUB

Posted Jun 17, 2004 14:12 UTC (Thu) by lutchann (subscriber, #8872)
In reply to: LILO vs. GRUB by Klavs
Parent article: LILO vs. GRUB

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...

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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.