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 ..."

Comments

LI

[Anonymous Coward]

fucked up partition table

Re: Well now Patrick will have to make a change

[armanox]

Slackware team offered to help. They might fork it

Re:there's still a healthy user base..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on Gentoo. With a lot of the systematic (ahem) churn nowadays, I feel a bit of kinship with the Slackware people.

When Grub got grubby (v2.0), I held off as long as I could with Grub 1. Then I found Syslinux and have never looked back. It *is* a little bit odd since you have to have the kernel in the same partition as extlinux, but this is not so strange if you are using a separate boot partition anyway. In my preferred setup, I have a statically linked Busybox and scripts in that partition so that it can serve both as the boot partition and a rescue partition (and I use the same kernel for both). I also have it set up so that early userspace is here--using a real file system instead of an initrd or initramfs. Why early userspace? I use LVM with the root partition on LVM. You don't *have* to use LVM, of course, the setup would work nicely, with normal partitions also.

What can I say?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Re:Well now Patrick will have to make a change

[DarkOx]

Nope, and he basically already said he does not plan to do so. New systems are going to be EFI more and more which means they will use ELILO, not LILO for systems using BIOS the current release of LILO will probably be fine and remain so.