Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Lilo vs. LVM

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

Apparently, though unproven, at 23:03 on Saturday 04 September 2010, walt did 
opine thusly:

> On 09/04/2010 07:11 AM, Konstantinos Agouros wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have a VM with a gentoo guest. For testing I set it up with an LVM
> > Volume Group that consisted of only one disk. Now I added a 2nd resized
> 
> > the FS but lilo stopped working. When I call it I get:
> Way back when I was using LILO, it had to be reinstalled to the boot block
> of the boot drive whenever the partition table changed.  The partition
> table was hard-wired into the boot block, so naturally the boot block
> needed to be updated.  Dunno if LILO still does that, and I can't recall
> how to re-install the boot block, either :/
> 
> > Is maybe grub the answer to my problem?
> 
> That's what I use, and it's not subject to the re-install problem.
> Bit of a learning curve at first, but worth it IMO.

Well, they are boot loaders,

BOOT_LOADERS ARE DIFFERENT. VERY DIFFERENT.

Not shouting, just emphasis. One cannot think of boot-loaders in OS terms, as 
they are not the OS.

lilo does indeed need to be re-written to disk when the partition table 
changes, it does not have the ability to dynamically read a disk, it has no 
clue what a file or an fs is. This makes life simple, but you need to remember 
the extra step.

grub does support dynamically reading disks, meaning there's no extra step 
when making changes. But it did move the complexity into menu.lst.

Which one to use? It's a trade-off. Decide for yourselves where you want the 
complexity to be, and use that one. You will never eliminate the complexity of 
a boot loader, you can however contain it somewhere YOU are familiar with and 
where you feel comfortable working with it.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com