On Tue, 2008-11-25 at 09:21 -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote: > Certainly in the past that didn't always work. lilo would assume hda > was 0x80 and if you had mixed ide and scsi you had to explitly teach > lilo that 0x80 was in fact sda not hda on your system, or it wouldn't > work.
As I _strongly_ made this point before (and will again for anyone who missed it ;), _both_ GRUB _and_ LILO _require_ mapping lines. _Neither_ can do it "automatically." > And in some cases your drive names change between boots depending on > driver load order, how does lilo deal with that? It does not, and there is a false sense it will. LILO can make some "assumptions," but it still has trouble. But this is a "great issue" in general -- the remapping of BIOS disks to the boot loader mapping. And it can get even worse. What about when the disk still shows up _after_ the BIOS has mapped it first, but now that's the first device from the standpoint of the OS? This has always been a major issue with software RAID and the multi-disk driver, through no fault of its own (among other things). FUTURE NOTE: I've long _avoided_ MD not because of MD, but because of things built around MD, touch MD and -- in general -- sometimes look at a set of MD slices (partitions) as individual Ext3. Although newer MD meta-data solves this, it's still a problem, and causes me to use hardware RAID for the system disk (e.g., cheap 3Ware 8006-2LP PCI-X or 9690SE-2LP PCIe). So what is happening now, and will be supported in GRUB v2, is the LVM2-DM approach to software RAID. LVM _never_ looks like Ext3, and has many other aspects. Using the DeviceMapper (DM) facilities, RAID-1 and other RAID levels are added. That completely encapsulates everything. Especially the boot-time ordering and "hand off" with device-mapping details for software RAID. Again, the current efforts are focused on RAID-1 as part of LVM2-MD, and adding full LVM support to GRUB v2. Personally, I cannot wait for that day. In fact, I've _never_ had a problem with LVM/LVM2 _except_ when people run it atop of MD, or use another distro's rescue disk. Both are always problematic, not because of any "bugs" in MD or the other distro's disk, but because of differences. > I wouldn't teach people about lilo personally. I think it is an awful > bootloader with an awful design (which happens to deal better with a few > odd cases, but of well). Nothing that big should be written in > assembly. I'm going to start another thread on this. Despite all his argumentative comments (in addition to the "lack of experience" with GRUB), there was one point I'd like to address. I hinted at it before. -- Bryan J Smith Professional, Technical Annoyance mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith ------------------------------------------------------------- Fission Power: An Inconvenient Solution _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
