Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (475 mails)

[Jiri Srain <jsrain@xxxxxxx>]

Hi!

Dne Friday 01 of August 2008 00:09:32 Christian Boltz napsal(a):
> Hello,
>
> on Donnerstag, 31. Juli 2008, Stanislav Visnovsky wrote:
> > As some of you've noticed, the bootloader configuration in openSUSE
> > was not in best shape for a couple of releases. Therefore, we plan to
> > drop the support for lilo bootloader from YaST (and thus
> > installation) and leave grub as the only supported bootloader on i386
> > and x86_64 in openSUSE 11.1.
> >
> > The reason is that there are almost no technical advantages to keep
> > both bootloaders
>
> What about booting from a software RAID 1? The last time I tried (with
> 10.3 IIRC), GRUB failed when / (including boot) was on a /dev/md*
> partition.

GRUB is able to boot from RAID1 (/dev/md*) array. However, the limitation is 
that this partition is located on both disks at the same area (typically both 
disks are partitioned the same way, or at least the system part).

> And there are still some "interesting" systems out there [1] which work
> with lilo, but don't with GRUB for various reasons.

The problems which you mentioned are not specified enough so that I could 
really comment. However, the only common problem which I'm aware of is the 
missdetection of the disks order. We have the same issue when installing e.g. 
on USB. User will be able to correct the detected disks order during 
installation.

LILO has its own way to detect it, which in some cases improves the situation 
and in other cases makes it worse.

Jiri

> > and it makes a lot of sense to focus on a single
> > solution and improve it.
>
> You say it ;-)
>
> I'm not really against dropping lilo support - but please make sure that
> GRUB works on all systems. Booting from software RAID is a must-have
> IMHO. (Support for "interesting" systems would be nice, but isn't a
> must-have.)
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Christian Boltz
>
> [1] mixed IDE+SCSI hard disks for example - a friend has such an
>     "interesting" system as home server (with openSUSE 10.2).
>     I could probably flood bugzilla completely if I reported all the
>     problems (not only caused by the harddisk layout) I hit with this
>     system ;-)) (and lots of those bugreports would be closed as "not
>     reproducable" I guess - sometimes I wonder myself why something
>     fails on this machine. Maybe I should search for the "manufactured
>     by BOFH" label...)



-- 
Regards,

Jiri Srain
YaST Team Leader
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