[SOLVED] lilo, BIOS vga mode, menu missing, Ryzen in a thinkpad, Slackware 15

spat · 02-13-2022, 03:30 AM

"A subject that accurately describes your problem will make your thread much more likely to get a quick response."

Anyway. I was on -current before and I had a lilo menu in red.

Congratulations all round though releasing 15.0, getting all those vanilla compiles to mesh together is wonderful. But I've lost that red menu block. I have just the one line lilo 24.2 prompt, which admittedly shows all my lilo labels if I press TAB which lets me use them.

I also had to append "mem=16G" to get lilo to work. This Lenovo Thinkpad BIOS (1.47, latest version, for model A285) has quirks.

"Boot loader will fall back to TEXT only operation", the VGA warning, and that's what it's doing. I think if I only used 4-bit shades it might work but the defaults use 8-bit.

Googling mutters about people in general ignoring it. I didn't get that warning with -current though.

The only other change I can see from the liloconfig skeleton is the initrd=/boot/initrd.gz I added, and LBA32.

My lilo has the default vga=standard still. There's supposed to be a way to display all acceptable vga modes at boot time but I've not managed that.

Ignoring grub, can anyone suggest what I might try in order to get my red menu back? It's trivial but it has me puzzled.

business_kid · 02-13-2022, 11:27 AM

The way is "Trial & Error." You're on your own here.

There was something like 16 modes every card was supposed to have automatically. I don't know how many it is now. But there's a pile of 3 digit number choices you can stick in to lilo.conf

Code:

vga=791

used to be a standard one. Find out what you can put in (Lilo docs) find out which ones don't crash your box(trial & error) and post your winning recipe.

EDIT: On a newish box like that, you should have the all-pervasive UEFI along without a boot loader from the last millenium. Your distro, your rules, I know, but I'd suggest it. That's coming from someone who has BIOS issues getting out of legacy mode. And the Thinkpads always have quirks which may not be in the generic kernel.

colorpurple21859 · 02-13-2022, 01:22 PM

Quote:

There's supposed to be a way to display all acceptable vga modes at boot time but I've not managed that.

vga=ask

allend · 02-13-2022, 05:34 PM

Quote:

I also had to append "mem=16G" to get lilo to work.

Try adding the 'large-memory' option to your /etc/lilo.conf
I always enable the 'lba32' and 'compact' options. I have never had hardware where there was a problem.

If you use 'vga=normal', the default BIOS settings are used, which will always work.
With 'vga=ask', you can see possible alternatives on your hardware.

I am happy to use the default Slackware LILO bitmap.

Code:

bitmap = /boot/slack.bmp
bmp-colors = 255,0,255,0,255,0
bmp-table = 60,6,1,16
bmp-timer = 65,27,0,255

spat · 02-14-2022, 03:11 AM

I'm grateful for all three responses, I'll report back when I've got somewhere. This Thinkpad BIOS is definitely an outlier.

spat · 02-14-2022, 04:45 AM

Okay. First off, this is what the BIOS appears to be telling me:

Code:

root@a285:~# lilo -T video

VGA adapter:

    640x350x16    mode 0x0010
    640x480x16    mode 0x0012

    320x200x256   mode 0x0013

root@a285:~#

though none of those modes, or any other I tried, removes the "fall back to TEXT only" warning.

I have got back to my red boot rectangle, with all my labels, by removing every part of the lilo.conf relating to vga or bmp. All I have now, which works fine, is:

Code:

root@a285:~# cat /etc/lilo.conf
append="mem=16G "
boot = /dev/nvme0n1
#lilo -M /dev/sda # will write a USB2 boot stick
LBA32
compact
message = /boot/message.txt
prompt
timeout = 300
change-rules
  reset

image = /boot/vmlinuz
  initrd=/boot/initrd.gz
  root = /dev/slack/root
  label = Linux
  read-only

image = /boot/vmlinuz-generic
  initrd=/boot/initrd.gz
  root = /dev/slack/root
  label = Generic
  read-only

image = /boot/vmlinuz-huge-5.15.19
  initrd=/boot/initrd-5.15.19.gz
  root = /dev/slack/root
  label = Linux-5.15.19
  read-only

- the message.txt is empty. No warnings, boot screen as desired, I have no idea why the warning showed up this time, it wasn't there with 14.2-current. The initrd.gz is there because I'm using LVM/LUKS for encryption at rest.

Thank you all again for the suggestions.

allend · 02-14-2022, 06:15 AM

A few comments.

Quote:

append="mem=16G "

I would write that with a space character between the initial double quote and the option as the kernel parses the append line as space delimited parameters.

Code:

append=" mem=16G"

Quote:

LBA32

That should be lower case.

Code:

lba32

I would still add a global option.

Code:

vga=normal

Quote:

image = /boot/vmlinuz
initrd=/boot/initrd.gz

The "initrd=" is unnecessary as the huge kernel does not use an initrd.

Quote:

image = /boot/vmlinuz-generic
initrd=/boot/initrd.gz
root = /dev/slack/root

The "root=" is unnecessary when an initrd is used, as it is specified in the initrd.gz

spat · 02-14-2022, 11:32 AM

Thank you allend, I've corrected those now. I still seem to need the initrd.gz with -huge, possibly because of luks encryption modules which might normally load that way. Dropping the root= line was a surprise.

I can now confidently add self-compiled kernels with my own edits, as a learning step. I'm sure it could be done with a grub2 configuration file but that's unfamiliar to me. My trivial compile script extends this working lilo.conf very easily now.

JayByrd · 02-14-2022, 01:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spat

...I still seem to need the initrd.gz with -huge, ...

Yes. While huge handles most common scenarios without an initrd, there are still times when an initrd is needed. E.g., using kernel-huge, I'm still trying to figure out all the modules I need in the initrd to get a macbook pro booting from a USB flash drive!