vote for Lilo

[Philip Pokorny]

> Message: 14 Date: Tue, 21 Oct 2003 13:23:50 -0700
 > From: Gordon Messmer <yinyang at eburg.com>
 > To: fedora-test-list at redhat.com
 > Subject: Re: vote for Lilo
 > Reply-To: fedora-test-list at redhat.com
 >
 > Samuel Flory wrote:
> 
>> Gordon Messmer wrote:
>>> Don't put /boot on a RAID partition... simple.  I don't believe that 
>>> either Grub or LILO are going to work reliably on any RAID type other 
>>> than RAID 1.
>> 
>>    Lilo in RH 9 works great on RAID1 arrays.
> 
> That's what I said.  Either Grub or LILO should work on RAID 1, but I 
> don't believe that either will work with RAID 0 or 5.
> 
>> Unlike with grub the RH 9 
>> installer installed lilo to both drives.
> 
> How'd it do that?  I confess that I've not used RH 9 with LILO, but I'm 
> not aware of any special directives that would make that work.  Lilo, 
> like grub is normally installed to the MBR of a drive.  RAID devices 
> will not include that, so perhaps you installed to the superblock of 
> your partition?  That should work with both grub and LILO, but both will 
> need another boot loader on the MBR to chain boot them from their 
> location at the superblock on the RAID partition.

LILO doesn't require any special directives.  It sees your /boot is a 
RAID-1 mirror and installs to the MBR of each disk with a member of the 
RAID set automatically.

Looking at the output of 'lilo -v -v -v' I would say that it *could* 
even handle different geometries and offsets of the RAID partitions on 
each drive.  It builds a map for each drive and installs lilo with it's 
map into the MBR of each disk.  It's a bit of a pain and very confusing 
to create such a config though, so I haven't personally tried it.

If it weren't for BugID 39365 (a silly typo that *really* should be fixed)

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=39365

LILO would effortlessly handle as many drives as you want.  I've 
personally built systems with 6 drives in a RAID1 mirror (6 copies of 
the same data).  Both SCSI and IDE work equally well.

That suffices to load the vmlinuz and initrd.

That together with partition type FD (RAID autodetect) is a wonder to 
behold.  It's cool to see Linux find and reconstruct all the RAID sets 
even after you re-arrange the drives in any order.

And LILO does it all automatically.

:v)

-- 
Philip Pokorny, Director of Engineering
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