LILO (boot loader)

Linux Loader, short LILO is a boot loader for Linux that can boot other operating systems due to its flexibility.

This program is free software and has received since 2002, strong competition from GRUB. As the development of LILO was resumed in June 2010, but one can assume that a sufficiently large number of users still exists.

The following example shows a LILO configuration file, which is normally located in the / etc / lilo.conf:

Large -memory lba32 boot = / dev / hda install = menu map = / boot / map promptly   default = Linux image = / boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26 label = "Linux" root = / dev/hda1 append = " " read-only optional   other = / dev/hda3 label = " FreeBSD " Explanation: LILO here for the correct installation of selection as Linux and FreeBSD.

Pros and Cons

A disadvantage of the fact LILO is to judge that after creating a new Linux kernel of the lilo command must be invoked. This command determines to be loaded from disk blocks of the kernel, because lilo is unable to deal with a file system. In the distributions therefore special scripts to be installed, which automatically call the program lilo after a system update.

If this process is forgotten, LILO can not boot the selected kernel, making the system will eventually unusable.

Other boot loader, such as GRUB, have drivers that can access a file system read, so that the step mentioned in the preceding paragraph does not apply.

This disadvantage of LILO will serve as an advantage, because unlike other boot loaders LILO is not limited to file systems and able to load the kernel also less known file systems, if the file system from which it is loaded, uncompressed and unencrypted is.