lilo or grub

[Jonathan D. Proulx]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 08:04:10PM +1200, Krsnendu dasa wrote:
:My most recent install of Ubuntu 8.04 it chose LVM. As a result lilo
:was installed instead of grub. Is there a reason for this? Are there
:any advantages  or disadvantages of one over the other?


Grub is better in many ways but needs to read from the filesystem at
boot time and can't understand LVM.

The "right thing" would have been for the installer to create a small
ext3 /boot filesystem that grub could understand an then put
everything else in LVM.

Grub is better becasue it allows you a much more useful bootloader
command line, so if you really screw up your system you have a better
time getting it back.  It also reads its config file from disk where
as lilo needs to be run on the comamnd line after updating its config
to get the changes into the boot block, then if you screw them up you
may be in a world of hurt because you can't do much from the lilo:
boot prompt (like select a kernel that you forgot to define or
mistyped in lilo.conf)

That all said if you don't do anything odd and use official stable
release packages for you kernel, you probably won't notice any
difference and everything will "just work".


-Jon