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LILO Bootloader Development To End
An anonymous reader writes: For any longtime Linux users, you probably remember the LILO bootloader from Linux distributions of many years ago. This bootloader has been in development since the 90's but development is finally ending. A homepage message reads, "I plan to finish development of LILO at 12/2015 because of some limitations (e.g. with BTFS, GPT, RAID). If someone want to develop this nice software further, please let me know ..."
fucked up partition table
RIP thanks for the memories
Well it looks like Patrick will have to make a change.
Time to offend someone
Thanks for maintaining LILO all these years. I certainly do remember LILO loading on my first installations of Linux. I tried to install it on an IBM PS/2 and the biggest challenge was their micro channel architecture. I don't think I was successful at all, but I learned quickly what the LIL... meant.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
.. of slackware people.
as a slackware user myself, i have no real problem with grub and i use it on a few machines where it's advantageous, but most of my systems still boot with lilo, and i don't see any need to change them around in the near future.
Hope he finds another non-job soon.
I was using LILO for quite a while recently, as my newest PC has a terrible UEFI system and the Debian installer couldn't configure GRUB by itself. It served me well in the interim.
Is it weird to feel nostalgia for a bootloader?
I'm sure they'll make an implementation of LILO in systemd soon enough :)
The current comments are mostly trolls and brain-dead idiocy. As typical for the new /.
It wasn't until around 1999-2000 (I think) that distros started replacing LILO with GRUB as the default bootloader. GRUB offered many new powerful features that certainly helped its adoption. That is not to say, though, that LILO didn't have benefits as well (and in some circumstances it still does). It's sad to see that such a pinnacle piece of software contributing to Linux's success is going to be discontinued by the project's primary developer. LILO is such an important part of Linux history that it deserves a place is some kind of "hall of fame". But, it's open sourced so maybe -- just maybe -- someone will pick up the project so that it doesn't die. If not then it will be fondly remembered by those of us who were using Linux back in the olden days (1994 was my first install). Even if it's not continued the source code is informative, but the trolls will not understand that and just keep on using whatever their bootloader and praising whatever it is without understanding wtf it actually does and how the boot process actually works.
...only sausage has two!
How many ends does a circle have?
for the maintainers. The bootloader is a not particularly glamorous problem to work on, but it's critical to everyone and because it involves differing interpretations of standards by manufacturers and various OS developers it had to have been a headache.
Of course later projects had the luxury of a clean sheet, hindsight, and more hardware resources, but without a solid bootloader in the early says of Linux, history would have been very different.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Infinite.
What about a circular sausage?
There are a lot of the LILO faithful in these comments piping up about how LILO still has advantages in some situations - but none of them are saying what those situations are.
Considering Grub is at worst an excellent product for well over 90% of use cases, I don't feel at all bad asking...What ARE the cases in which LILO is better?
I don't ask to troll. I've been using Linux since 1993, and was fine with LILO until the turn of the century or so, when Grub took its place in almost all the major distributions. I just don't see, as a developer, desktop user, gamer, DBA, or sysadmin (I wear all these hats and then some on a daily basis) any cases where Grub doesn't fit my needs, or in which LILO provides functionality I'm not getting from Grub. I'm genuinely curious what those cases are, even if it's just knowledge that gets filed away in my own personal archives...
I used it a very long time ago and countless people have used it before and since. It's far better to have a definite end date rather than just sporadic updates that grow farther apart and less significant, - leaving people to wonder if it's being maintained or not.
Instead of the maintainer feeling the occasional pang of guilt over not doing anything, they can feel good about what was accomplished during the life of the project and move on to the next thing.
It goes to eleven
How long until systemd replaces grub?
No.
I used it like people use locks on their homes, I had a boot floppy with LILO and no MBR on the fixed disk, so the floppy had to be in the computer to boot as it literally booted from LILO installed on a floppy disk, then LILO found the kernel on the fixed disk and the OS loaded. Take the floppy out and the computer doesn't boot.
Obviously this wasn't going to keep out people that knew what they were doing and came prepared with their own bootable media, but it kept out roommates and their friends. I didn't even have to take the floppy disk all of the way out of the computer, simply unmounting it from the spindle and leaving it in the drive was enough. No one at the time gave that a second thought.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I've used it recently in some distro I tried (maybe a Slackware derivative) and I was surprised it still worked well after all these years (it's an old machine, but anyway...).
I can only say thanks... to Werner, John and Joachim. These three guys have been in the forefront of the good battle and millions of people owe them at least a lot of respect.
I wonder whether there are any scenarios where LILO works and Grub won't...
LILO - Grub, Xfree86 - Xorg, SysV - Systemd, Fvwm - KDE & Xfce, OpenOffice.org - Libreoffice, lots of change for me all these years.
To all you which made the world lighter for others, next time you take a sip of your favorite beverage (wine, beer, tea, whatever), please make a toast to yourselves in my name. Please know there's someone somewhere on this Earth that is very grateful to you and thinks you're the best.
PS: All the other folks in software I didn't mention, you're in this one, too. (mc, Gimp, Konqueror, Kwin, Inkscape, Audacity, the kernel, GNU, etc. etc.)
I have two big, black sausages in my both of my holes right now.
- Kathleen Malda nee Fent
Poettering will soon release a boot loader with systemd because GRUB and LILO are 'too difficult to use'. Instead you'll have to define the boot loader in an XML and then use /usr/sbin/bootloaderctl to load/unload it. However if your boot loader is not "vendor-defined" to on in your distribution, you'll have to manually load it every kernel upgrade.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Yes, I'm sorry.
#DeleteChrome
LIL-Oh fuck. Those three letters, sitting there, staring you out, striking fear in the hearts of many a valiant penguinista.
From the "Things were not better back then, they were a sodding nightmare" dept.
You've pretty much described how GRUB took over from LILO whenever you describe how systemd took over from sysV init.
Nearly limitless arrogance catering to people intimidated by the extra care that is needed to use simpler, more elegant systems...
"XXX is too hard! Use YYY! It's better! Don't listen to those old guys in the suspenders, they are smelly hippies! You shouldn't have to learn to do anything, the computer should do it for you!"
Same for me. My computer booted to Windows95, unless you had the mystery floppy in the drive (1 of hundreds scattered about) -- Then it would boot to linux. What did I use this secret installation for? Nothing useful at the time. I just missed the unix machines I had access to in college.
If you look deep into the internals of windows, you will find GRUB there. Fanboi much?
Captcha -> decline
I still use lilo on all 3 of my boxes. I don't need a pre boot "enviroment" or however grub is described, I just want the OS booted and up and running ASAP. If there's a problem with booting I'll just grab a live DVD , I'm not going to wrestle with a load of cryptic bootloader commands to try and solve the problem.
That still has a happy end(ing) for all sausages involved.
Sad. Grub is too complicated. I like lilo for the simple configuration file. Great power
You know, passwords?
this post contain no useful information, no need to mod it down
I'm out.
*BSD ftw.
My personal/playpen Linux box at work is Slackware. It uses LILO. Of course.
There is always a place for software that works. Software that does one thing, does exactly what it's supposed to do, and does it well.
...laura
Can't simply replace LILO with systemd?
LIL-
they're a pain in the ass
But where is the SDLO, SystemDLOader? Why are the Systemd-cult still using Linux as their loader? How old fashioned is that?
First init, and now this? Where will it end?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
LI
Not sure if you noticed, but Microsoft has replaced its boot loader a few times now (BCD vs boot.ini vs Whatever they added in Windows 8)
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
LI... ...
The end
Thanks for your work! One thing we never were quite sure about in the early days much like the Linux name itself, is it pronounced lie-low or lil-oh?
If someone is prompted with a password prompt they may be inclined to try guessing for awhile. If they're prompted with a disk-boot error they simply turn off the computer and walk away.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I have a hard disk with a vintage 1 block MBR dating back to the early '00s which thanks to Ubuntu removing grub1, no longer can install grub2 (since grub2 doesn't support block chaining, as grub1 did) since it demands a larger space before the first partition to install into.
LILO is the one way to go on that system.
Additionally, grub doesn't play well with SCSI and some older systems I had with adaptec SCSI drivers as the boot disk were only capable of booting if using lilo (I think syslinux would work as well, but hell if I ever figured out how to get it to properly install.)
That said, lilo was built for the mbr era, where a single 512(maybe up to 2048, depending on the paritioning tool?) byte block (and not even all of that) was all you were guaranteed access to, quite often with the necessity of utilizing the 16 bit bios extensions in order to be able to suitably load from the system's storage medium. For that purpose lilo was and still is impecabble. But it is a tool built for x86 mbrs, and with the death of the mbr and traditional bios there are better solutions possible and incompatibility is imminent (just like UEFI graphics cards for those of us still running traditional bios systems.)
Software maturity can only last as long as hardware and firmware maturity and at this point in time the latter are in a great deal of flux, only some of which is truly necessary for the changes taking place.
Circa PPro/first gen Xeon era. Maybe later.
Having spent a few hours fiddling with grub, grub2, and lilo, only the latter properly loaded on all systems I tried. Additionally any system with only a 512 byte bootsector can't load grub2 anymore since they got rid of blockchaining as unreliable.
LBA versus cylinder mode issues.
People often forget about the dark days of CHS, LBA, LBA48 and the bios that had to be kludged around for one or more of their non-functional modes.
I only switched to GRUB because of installed defaults and my laziness. LILO was, imo, always simpler, cleaner, made more sense.
GRUB works, but it feels like it's been engineered to be way more than it needs to be, and, in the process, it starts to suck. As an example, I started looking into GRUB theming (hey, a pretty boot screen would be nice). Turns out I could never convince GRUB to use a TTF font and display the table (and items in the table) correctly. That's a feature that may as well not be in there -- if it doesn't work, turf it. I didn't *need* it, but I spent a bit of time trying to get it to work and failing, which I wouldn't have bothered with if it just weren't there. Or there's the interactive boot -- works if you already know by rote all of the GRUB internals, at the currently installed level; completely useless otherwise. That being said, it does still work, and I still use it to select an OS -- I just miss LILO.
Also, LILO was quite explicit about the "you need to run me to update the MBR" ruling. Which I found kind of comforting: if you didn't make the active choice to update your MBR, you didn't make the active choice to break it with a bad config.
Also, diversity leads to better overall design across the spectrum. Any time a competitor is lost, it's sad for the ecosystem as a whole.
Stating that LILO and GRUB were "confusing and broken", Lennart Poettering has announced that SystemD will take over MBR management. "It's just a small step towards complete system domination", the great leader was heard to muse, "After all, PulseAudio did so well and everyone is loving how much easier SystemD is than init scripts. What could possibly go wrong?".