Lilo complains about the device-mapper is missing from kernel.
"/proc/misc", "Is device mapper missing from kernel?".

This has been reported before and is still occurring.

The device-mapper is missing because it is now optional under the
MD config items with the RAID and LVM stuff. From what I have determined, it must only be needed to handle the mapping of a logical volume address to multiple drives/partitions/sectors.

Lilo was able to cope with simple drives since its creation, and apparently still does, although it gives no indication of it in its complaining.

In my opinion, this is a Lilo bug. It should cope silently with kernels that do not have RAID/LVM and not look like an installation error.

The problem is that the same message (looks identical) has shown up in a non-Lilo related posting.

Question: Is this message coming from somewhere other than Lilo ??

Question: Does everyone who dares turn off the RAID/LVM support have to put up with these kind of error messages ??

Question: In a simple system without RAID and no LVM, are all such missing device-mapper messages bogus ?? That is does anyone know of any situation where the message indicated something important ??

Question: Do users WITHOUT RAID/LVM need to put in the device-mapper
for any other use (besides shutting up Lilo) ??

I have seen that message on pretty much every machine I have ever installed LILO on, and always just ignore it. LILO seems rather verbose in general (I.E. warning about LBA 48, even though that is what everyone wants), so I have gotten used to it. It isn't like you have to re-run LILO that often anyway (unless you are a kernel fanatic or something).

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Thanks for replying.
After 10 years of using Lilo, this is the first time I have seen this error message.
It only showed up on the latest Slackware relase 13.1 (my previous is Slackware 10.2, which apparently has device-mapper always present).

I assume, that if you are seeing this message too, that you are doing many installs without RAID/LVM, or all that, and are not seeing any other problems.

I could not find the error messages in
>> strings /sbin/lilo
nor could I them in the kernel, nor by grep kernel source.
I do not know where they actually come from.