On 10/20/2014 10:39 AM, ellanios82 wrote:

On 10/20/2014 05:28 PM, Cristian Rodríguez wrote:

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It is not clear what problem are you trying to solve and why...

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- thank you : i do not know enough to be scientific :

what i dream of is a booting system that is nuke-proof and always works

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thanks

DOS :-) Ken -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 10/20/2014 05:28 PM, Cristian Rodríguez wrote:

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It is not clear what problem are you trying to solve and why...

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- thank you : i do not know enough to be scientific : .................................

LILO seemed originally to be straight forward - grub and grub2 seem to be less & less straight forward ............. regards -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 10/20/2014 10:45 AM, ellanios82 wrote:

LILO seemed originally to be straight forward

"Yes, it used to be, but we changed all that." The most significant change is that we are using larger disks so a lot of how the original LILO specified how to peel off the second stage boot no longer makes sense. In fact the old cylinder - sector - head model got stretched out of all recognition. If you address certain sectors then -- oops, that's a bad patch on the disk and the disk electronics have a means of doing a look-aside to another place on the disk. And guess where the code that does all that lives? Right. And guess what happens if that gets corrupted, as happened to me earlier this year... And once you start dealing with SATA ... And all of this part of the boot has nothing what so ever to do with systemd. That happens after the first stage boot, and even after the boot process has peeled off all the stuff surrounding grub (or grub2 or lilo or whatever), and it takes grub (...) to bring in initrd, which gets the kernel in place. Perhaps that's what you mean by "boot"? Only after that all has happened do we get to systemd initializing user side processes (that is, non kernel stuff). So now we can segue from Voltaire to Carroll: <quote> 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.' 'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.' 'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.' </quote> and then again <quote> 'If I'd meant that, I'd have said it,' said Humpty Dumpty. </quote> And then there's matters like being able to boot alternative things (which may not simply be operating systems, and which may not even be on the same drive as the boot stuff you're talking about) and setting up the console so you can see the menu, regardless of what the screen is, and making sure you are using it at a suitable resolution. If you can get LILO do do all this I'm delighted, but thank you I'll continue to use grub2 and initrd to boot my system into a situation where systemd can start initializing processes in the user space. -- . . . As we, the leaders, deal with tomorrow, our task is not to try to make perfect plans. . . . Our task is to create organizations that are sufficiently flexible and versatile that they can take our imperfect plans and make them work in execution. That is the essential character of the learning organization. - Gordon R. Sullivan & Michael V. Harper -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 10/21/2014 03:24 AM, Per Jessen wrote:

Anton Aylward wrote:

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On 10/20/2014 10:45 AM, ellanios82 wrote:

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LILO seemed originally to be straight forward

"Yes, it used to be, but we changed all that."

The most significant change is that we are using larger disks so a lot of how the original LILO specified how to peel off the second stage boot no longer makes sense.

In fact the old cylinder - sector - head model got stretched out of all recognition. If you address certain sectors then -- oops, that's a bad patch on the disk and the disk electronics have a means of doing a look-aside to another place on the disk. And guess where the code that does all that lives? Right. And guess what happens if that gets corrupted, as happened to me earlier this year...

And once you start dealing with SATA ...

No problems there, Anton. LILO works just fine.

Nice to know. But now I've got Dracut to help me with the initrd, and grub2 letting me edit things when I need to, I'm a happy camper with this part of the boot process. Now if only i could have equal confidence in teh disks themselves. -- The only real training for leadership is leadership. - Antony Jay -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org