LILO Boot-Loader Development To Cease At End Of Year

[phoronix]

Phoronix: LILO Boot-Loader Development To Cease At End Of Year

While most of you probably haven't used the LILO bootloader in years in place of GRUB(2), the developer of "LInux LOader" intends to cease development at the end of the year...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LILO-Bootloader-EOY

[cb88]

Ever since the grub2 configuration got stupid.. I prefer syslinux (extlinux specifically but... the whole lot is pretty nice, handy and flexible).

[kaidenshi]

Ever since the grub2 configuration got stupid.. I prefer syslinux (extlinux specifically but... the whole lot is pretty nice, handy and flexible).

As of the last stable release (14.1), Slackware still uses Lilo but also is compatible with Grub and syslinux. I believe I'll take syslinux over Grub2 myself. :-)

[Gusar]

That LILO is behind Grub2's feature set is a *good* thing. Grub2 is a frikkin' monster. I wouldn't touch it with a 10ft pole. LILO does what it's supposed to do - load Linux - and nothing more.

Syslinux is the way to go. Or gummiboot/systemd-boot on an EFI machine, though syslinux has an EFI variant too. For example, syslinux is great for booting a 64bit kernel on a machine with 32bit UEFI.
I used LILO for a while on my old netbook, the Acer Aspire One A110L. Because that thing is the quirkiest machine ever, and among its quirks was a serious dislike of syslinux 4. But syslinux is at version 6 now, and this version goes along well with the A110L, so I've retired LILO.

[Ericg]

On Arch UEFI setups the Wiki has actually stopped pushing Grub2 as the default bootloader and is instead opting for systemd-boot (formerly Gummiboot). Personally I never used LILO but I can't exactly cry over there now being one less project all fighting over the same use-case

[steveriley]

For me, rEFInd strikes the perfect balance. It's more than a minimalist boot manager but it isn't nearly the gnarly beast that is GRUB. Adding the ability to do a few other things at boot -- run an EFI shell, manage machine owner keys, run a memory test -- are useful extra functions for a boot manager.

[endman]

LILO Boot-Loader Development To Cease At End Of Year

Thank goodness, they've final put an end to this BSD licensed piece of crap.

Thank GPL for GRUB our saviour.

[Kano]

LILO used blocklists to load the kernel+initrd, which means a reinstall of the bootloader was needed on every update. I switched over to GRUB as soon as I got my first 8 GB hd - GRUB was first to support lba32 - LILO needed a bit longer. As soon as you are used to GRUB(2) you usally don't look back. UEFI boot with LILO is impossible as well, so really time to retire it.

[Ardje]

I use either grub 1 from disk or pxelinux (syslinux) for pxe boots.
I tried a pxeboot using grub 1 but at that time it wasn't compatible with all bugs in pxe implementations.
And for most of my systems I use u-boot (most desktops and servers) :-), I also got a redboot (old nas), and an intel (cefboot?) specific one in a nas.
All my access-points use u-boot, and I think my newer switches (running linux) do too. My older (running ecos) have a more simple one. And I can assure you: the linux based switch never failed, but the ecos version is buggy as hell.

[pal666]

there is nothing hard with grub2 and it allows you to boot iso from file for install or livecd test. systemd-boot is probably ok for simple uses