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

Well now Patrick will have to make a change

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Well it looks like Patrick will have to make a change.

Re: Well now Patrick will have to make a change

[armanox]

Slackware team offered to help. They might fork it

Re: Well now Patrick will have to make a change

[resfilter]

it's perfectly ok for a really mature peice of software to stay in a distrubution, even in a relatively unmaintained state.

you don't have to 'change' something just because new features aren't being added anymore, until the lack of a new feature prevents it from being installed on more than a few edge cases, or a substantial bug is found that makes its use unsafe.

i doubt either of these will be the case with lilo for many years.

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.

Re: Well now Patrick will have to make a change

[omnichad]

the fundamental nature of how our computers boot is always up for GRUBs.

Nice work developers!

[nycsubway]

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.

there's still a healthy user base..

[resfilter]

.. 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.

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.

Simple but functional

[UbuntuniX]

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.

Mostly troll posts

[Psychotria]

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.

I'd like to take a moment to express appreciation

[hey!]

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.