Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
Notice that it's an AC that did it, too. It's actually pretty funny, in a sorry sort of way.
/dev/random
Nothing serious. GRUB doesn't have to be reloaded each time you add or take away a kernel. It's only a 5 second procedure in LILO (or 2-3 minutes if you have to manually monkey with the lilo.conf file). Personally, I prefer LILO for working with kernels because I touch the lilo.conf file each time a kernel is compiled. It makes it easier for me to weed out possible boot-loading problems when I'm making changes to kernel code.
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.
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.)
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?"
What do you use that to do? Grub booted my raid1 flawlessly, just map (hd0) and (hd0,0) to the /dev nodes and install normally.
I am trolling
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.
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.
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.
How about this?
grub> savedefault --default=1 --once
Use it in a script, type it by hand, put it in grub.conf, etc. Works for me.
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.