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The Boot Loader Showdown
An anonymous reader writes "What utility do practically all Linux users use, regardless of their job or expertise? A boot loader. In this article from IBM, see how a boot loader works, meet two popular loaders -- LILO (LInux LOader) and GNU GRUB (GRand Unified Boot loader) -- and review the pros and cons of each." From the article: "Most simply, a boot loader loads the operating system. When your machine loads its operating system, the BIOS reads the first 512 bytes of your bootable media (which is known as the master boot record, or MBR). You can store the boot record of only one operating system in a single MBR, so a problem becomes apparent when you require multiple operating systems. Hence the need for more flexible boot loaders.""
so, which dupeloader is the best?
I use CmdrTaco, works best with my old version of the beowulf cluster....
Whoa, tone down the technical mumbo-jumbo a bit, I'm having trouble following. So now what you're saying is that Linux thing is now on computers?
On my dual-boot laptop, the virus protection in Windows doesn't recognize Grub, so it will wipe the boot sector if it's the primary boot loader. But I realy like not having to do anything after installing a new kernel, so I want to use Grub.
The solution? Install Grub on the Linux partition, and use Lilo to load it. It is rather funny watching the boot messages go through Lilo to get to Grub.
...GRUB is the ultimate choice. It understands multiple OSes (including Windows XP), is very flexible and easy to use and uses a highly ethical license. Oh... and it doesn't require you to reinstall it after you make a change to it's config file like LILO does. No need to read any further. I have spoken.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Is it really all the important? You see it for about 3 seconds, each time you boot your computer. If you are booting your computer more than 3 times a day, you should look into VMware so you don't have to reboot so often to access all those different OSes you have. Either that, or switch to a more stable OS. As long as it can boot the OSes you want, is there any real reason to have one over the other? I think this is kind of pointless. I just go with whatever my distro (mandriva) offers by default (lilo). It's such a minimal part of my computer, that I couldn't be bothered to even think of changing it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
For anyone getting ready to load a Linux instance on a VMWare virtual machine, save yourself some time and use LILO. GRUB does not work as best I can tell. Boots to a fun error message after initial install. LILO works like a charm.
I was going to post but computer says LIL-
Philip
Signatures are broken
Yeah, you have posted this before!
Yeah, but there is a big:
diff -u post1 post2
--- post1 Tue Jan 3 09:35:05 2006
+++ post2 Tue Jan 3 09:34:20 2006
@@ -1,4 +1,6 @@
-Francesca
+An
+anonymous
+reader
writes
"What
utility
@@ -125,4 +127,4 @@
more
flexible
boot
-loaders."
+loaders.""
If the authors would have been the same and the second one didn't have an extra '"' at the end of it, it would have been the perfect dupe.
Until GRUB implements the equivalent of LILO's raid-extra-boot, I'll keep using LILO thankyouverymuch.
I don't understand how GRUB can have gone so long without that feature. I know there are ways to do it (we'll call them work-arounds), but I don't want to have to work around the lack of a feature!
Notice that it's an AC that did it, too. It's actually pretty funny, in a sorry sort of way.
/dev/random
It's a carbon copy Reboot of this slashdot article.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
If you don't want grub, you need to *REPLACE* the MBR with something else, like LILO or plain old DOS FDISK /MBR.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
No 'showdown' is needed. Aren't there enough flamewars around the Web as it is? Technically, both bootloaders are good. Use the one that works best for you.
Politically, if you must use only GPL software, then go with GRUB. LILO has a _very_ open license, but it does not meet RMS's strict and unyeilding requirements.
GRUB SUCKS!
Until they support USB keyboards that is. Maybe the bleeding edge versions do now but everything shipped with a distro lately does not. in LILO I can use a usb keyboard, GRUB for some reason decided to do things differently and ignores USB keyboard input.. which sucks big time on a new machine that has nothing but USB.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's it!
I'm going to download the slashcode and hack in an auto-dupe-check using diff... If you are too similar the article get's an automatic first post of "DUPE!"
GAG (graphical)
Gujin
Syslinux
Meh.
I keed, I keed!
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
My kitten Luna loads my boots with shredded paper and cat toys every night. She is the best boot loader ever!
WARNING: Smoking this sig may cause lowered IQ, insanity or short term memory loss. It is also really bad for your monit
My biggest problem, and why I stick with LILO as opposed to using GRUB, is because of the current state of the GRUB development. I'm not exactly sure what's going on with the GRUB project, I have seen their website, and read their information, but I don't understand where they are at in their development, especially with GRUB 2. GRUB has been labelled their legacy product, which does mean it has been released, and relatively stable. However, they have completely stopped work on their legacy GRUB product and began working on GRUB 2. GRUB 2 doesn't have a stable release yet (they have builds released via CVS or whatever build versioning system they use). What should we expect from GRUB 2, that GRUB or LILO doesn't offer? I don't like the setup and install process for GRUB, I find it more convoluted than the setup, install, and configuration (lilo.conf) of LILO.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
.. because, an OS has one of two choices. Either it uses it's own boot loader, or it requires a third party one.
I don't know anything about ReactOS, but Windows ships with it's own, and always has since 95. If you installed "real" Windows on this computer, it would overwrite the MBR and get rid of Grub. But if installing RactOS does *not* do this, then it likely does not ship with it's own boot loader, so you would *have* to use Grub or some other tool to load it.
Unless it uses the old DOS boot loader but does not ship with it, which would be very weird.
In any case, you can download DOS boot disk images from bootdisk.com and fdisk /mbr, no problem. (if you don't have a flyppy drive, just use the image to make a bootable CD.)
I use Yaboot you insensitive clod!
i'm the jedidiahmarkfoster your parents warned you about
Try enable "USB Legacy support" or similiar in BIOS. Has helped me every time.
I'm a diehard LILO user, it works for chuff's sake so don't muck with it, but the issue you are seeing is not the fault of the bootstrap loader.
Any bootstrap loader, be it GRUB, LILO or NTLDR.EXE, must necessarily use the BIOS to interact with the hardware, because no drivers are loaded yet.
Your BIOS setup should have an option something like "legacy USB keyboard" which takes the keystrokes from the USB keyboard and makes them appear to have come from the "old style" keyboard instead. Enable this and GRUB should work.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
This article explains how to write your own boot sector. The tutorial includes assembly language code to demonstrate loading and executing a binary image from a FAT filesystem. It's also an interesting read if you want to understand the fundamentals of the X86 boot process.
-Brandon "How much you wanna make a bet I can throw a football over them mountains?"
GRUB still lacks LILO's incredibly useful feature of changing the default image to boot for only the next boot process. This functionality is not wholly replaced by the 'fallback' directive either. I use GRUB now but when I used to often dual boot I would use LILO for the ability to be able to say from the command line "boot windows" and then have linux be the default boot image again after I shutdown windows.
LILO is still actively developed and handles things like RAID disks and special hardware much better than GRUB (which is why it still ships with all the various distributions).
Yes.
There's one key LILO feature missing from GRUB, as far as I know: lilo -R
This allows me to install a new kernel on a box I'm not in front of, and tell LILO to boot it by default for the next boot only. If the new kernel doesn't work, I only have to ask somebody near the machine to reboot it for me, and it'll come back up in my old, working kernel. With GRUB, I'd have to try to talk somebody through hooking up a monitor and picking the right kernel... when it's a headless colocated server located somewhere far away, that's not always an appealing idea.
\\'
Did you wave the dead chicken ?
You forgot to wave the dead chicken didn't you ?
Bah, newbie...
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Oh, I see. Claim Linux can't do something, then wait for everyone to fall over themselves to prove Linux is teh r0x0rs!!! This almost seems a troll since SuSe, Mandriva, and Fedora have been doing exactly what you're asking about for quite some time.
Anyway, check out Bootsplash, it does what you're looking for.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
If there were two pieces of software which I would say actively ward off more people from installing Linux, it is the boot loader and X video driver config. Both of them can be installed without issue using any standard installer with a user accepting defaults, and the system can fail to boot properly which are very, very poorly documented to debug and repair, especially in a dual-boot scenario. Recently I did a Suse 10 install, and it installed a video driver which even prevented Sax from working. Also, although I installed it on a secondary partition on my primary boot drive, for some reason it decided to install the boot loader on some other drive. Both were a pain to fix, but I wouldnt know how a first-time Linux user would even know where to start.
One of the things I love about linux is that you don't have to re-learn how to use everything with each version of the OS. So you know how to set all of the network setting under NT (that is to say you know where all the happy icons to do it are.) Well with 2000 and then again with XP you have to look like an idiot looking through all of the happy icons trying to find the right one to reset your network configuration (or whatever.) How often have you felt like saying "it was here under NT or 98 or 3.11 or whatever, so why isn't it here now?" Well it is not there anymore under XP! And you are going to have re-learn everything (and maybe re-train your staff) because someone says that this new way is better. If this new way is so much better why didn't they have it set up this way from the very beginning?
I have used lilo from the beginning of my linux adventure. I know how to configure it and I know how it works. It does everything I need it to do (which is mostly just to load linux and maybe keep track of several kernels/ distros that I am playing with.)
So why should I even spend 2 seconds trying to figure out how to use grub? Gentoo tells you to use grub by default. I say no I will always install and use lilo until grub does something that I want/need that lilo doesn't do. True if I were just starting out I would learn grub -- but that ship has sailed. Once I know how to do something I don't want to relearn it just because someone says I should.
Slackware continues to ship with LILO as the default boot loader. The other option is loadlin. Grub is not even included. Slackware's motto is Keep It Simple [Stupid], and while Grub does have features that LILO lacks, it is more complicated, and so is not shipped with Slackware.
peace
Interesting, the original article by Francesca didn't make it to the front page, but a dupe from the prestigious "anonymous reader" did. This wouldn't have anything to do with the obviously female name, would it? Naah, sure girls can write interesting stuff, but dupes by anonymous submitters are just soooo much more convincing.
There are situations where neither LILO nor GRUB seem to do the job. Here Syslinux can come in very handy. The cool feature of syslinux is that it allows you the ability to run your own custom code to decide which OS should be loaded. Here is an example taken from the syslinux mailing list:
You maintain a bunch of multiboot machines, which should only boot into Windows during some part of the day, only into linux during some part of the day and give you a choice during the rest of the day.
Issue 1: The OSes themselves are on the local machines, but definition of "part of the day" should be centrally administered
Issue 2: People can bring in their laptop's and plug in to the network. But a malicious user should not be able to defeat this network administered definition of "part of day".
My Tech Posts on Twitter
I'm really not trying to be a troll here, but a boot loader is such a small part of the OS. Nothing is saying you can't use LILO, GRUB, or any of the other smaller boot loaders out there (or bigger ones from former companies such as PowerQuest that also supported Linux). Each has their plusses and their minuses and they're all nicely documented in countless comparisons. Each distro has its own preference, but often gives you the option.
So the answer is to use what you're comfortable with. It's not like we're comparing Zeus/Apache, Linux/Windows, Vim/Joe- this is a boot loader. It runs for fractions of a second and then you never see it again. If it does its job, you should never even know that its there.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Why Grub? Why complicate the simple task of loading an OS with a fucking shell language? LILO is simple and just works. I've hosed systems trying to get Grub to work, never with LILO.
The fact that you don't need to remember to re-install your boot loader every time you change the slightest thing is a major bonus though.
It's not that hard to remember. And if you forget, it's trivial to fix. Switching to Grub for that incredibly tiny minor microscopic inconvenience is just curing the disease by killing the patient.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why isn't the PC bios responsible for loading O/Ses? because the PC bios is a relic, a leftover from the days of 8086. Why aren't bioses 32-bit? why PCs still have to boot in real mode?
Bootloaders are very clever pieces of coding, but their presence makes it difficult for PC bioses to be replaced.
With this approach, there's no need to put drivers needed at boot time in the kernel. (Drivers are user programs under QNX.) The kernel doesn't need to know about disks. If you want a GUI during boot, you can have it. For embedded systems, the entire "OS file system" can be put in ROM, eliminating any need for a disk. For desktop x86 systems, there's a standard bootable "OS file system" which has all the usual disk and display drivers, the bus enumerators and plug-and-play handler, and the rest of the stuff needed to start an x86 PC. But all that startup stuff isn't in the kernel.
This is especially useful when your target is something that doesn't have a keyboard and screen. That's why QNX does this. Doing it this way cleans much startup-only junk out of the kernel.
The Minix 3 people, unfortunately, didn't get this, so their "microkernel" has more stuff in it than it really needs.
user 2 replies X is totally lame because it doesnt do D and E, but Y does it awez0mex0rz
user 1 replies that Y is fine but if you want to do A youre up shit creak.
user 3 then makes the brilliant observation identical to the end of every other goddamn technical showdown that.. say it with me.. IT DEPENDS!!! OMFG +5 INSIGHTFUL! huzzah. Now move along, youre coffee is getting cold.
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No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.