LILO (boot loader)
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LILO (Linux Loader) is a boot loader for Linux developed by John Coffman.
LILO does not depend on a specific file system, and can boot an operating system (e.g., Linux kernel images) from floppy disks and hard disks. One of up to sixteen different images can be selected at boot time. Various parameters, such as the root device, can be set independently for each kernel. LILO can be placed either in the master boot record (MBR) or the boot sector of a partition. In the latter case something else must be placed in the MBR to load LILO.
At system start, only the BIOS drivers are available for LILO to access hard disks. For this reason, with very old BIOSes, the accessible area is limited to cylinders 0 to 1023 of the first two hard disks. For later BIOSes, LILO can use 32-bit "logical block addressing" to access practically the entire storage of all the harddisks that the BIOS allows access to.
While LILO was the de-facto bootloader for Linux distributions in the early years of Linux's popularity, it has lately become a second choice in favour of the GRUB bootloader.
See also
- Linux
- Boot loader
- GNU GRUB
- elilo
- Lilo for other uses of the word
External links
- [Official Website]
- [LILO at freshmeat]
- [LILO installation instructions]
- [LILO mini-HOWTO]
- [LILO error messages]
- [Jumping bootfloppy]
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