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The beautiful thing about Slackware I've also found is, regardless how it's setup using Grub, Grub-legacy, LILO, or SysLinux, Slackware caters to everyone by just simply working well in all regards.
I prefer Grub2 because it's showing to be more future-minded with UEFI, GPT, and 64-bit addressing friendly. I actually have no issues with LILO from my own experience. LILO is still a great bootloader for CMOS and MBR PCs. Time will tell if UEFI and GPT will be added along with 64-bit addressing, but if and when, I'm fairly certain Patrick will address it and see if an update is needed. One good thing I've noticed with Grub is it doesn't have to be reset every time you change the kernel even if the kernel is the same version and namesake if you use the symlinks in grub.cfg (which can be edited with script editors like KATE if you know what to program in). Personally, real usage trumps benchmarks in every regards and not all benchmarks duplicate real usage. But the good thing is, with Slackware, you know what you get, and you know what you want for the system, and with the right tools, it can happen. |
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Even in the case of Lilo, all you need do it srun the lilo command once to update after the change. Not sure how this can be considered a big deal. |
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Very true. However, most Linux distributions by default recommend using a separate /boot partition anyways. With hard drive space being plentiful anymore, one could create the required /boot partition and not have to worry about size. Most /boot partitions for distributions I've seen that use them all recommend using at least 50-100MB anyway for /boot with a basic file system like EXT2/3/4.
I am surprised at them moment Patrick hasn't added eLILO yet for GPT systems as it is one of the only other bootloaders I forgot to mention that works with GPT partitions and UEFI systems without penalty. I also noticed someone said GRUB2 has a lot of dependencies... well so does every other piece of software anymore. The dependencies for Grub2 thankfully are very small in size on disk, and should be the least of worries. |
FWIW There is a utility with the Slackware installation disk that does allow one to deal with a GPT partition. I had to used it. I don't remember the name. (I'm at work)
Slackware comes as a working basic OS. It come with just about everything one needs to get a working server or desktop. From there we have SlackBuilds. PS I always set aside a /boot partition for about 256M -JJ |
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And Slackware 14 ships gptfdisk in the a/ series: Quote:
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The "BIOS Boot partition" can be as small as 30 KiB but the general advice on most websites I looked at seems to be that you should make 1 MiB because future boot loaders might require more space and many modern disk partitioning tools have 1 MiB partition alignment policies. The purpose of this partition is that on GPT systems under BIOS, the lack of post-MBR embed gap on GPT disks makes space a little tight. Grub2 works around this by having the first stage of its bootloader look for a "BIOS boot partition" where it stores a second, bigger file. This second stage file includes support for a large set of filesystems. Extlinux however has a different solution. Since it supports fewer filesystems, its first stage is still small enough to include ext2+/btrfs support. It can therefore have the second stage on the /boot partition directly. Of course it still needs to know which partition is the /boot partition and this is done by marking it with a special attribute, which you can think of as being similar to marking a partition as bootable in the MBR world. @ReaperX7 you tried setting up a Slackware system with GPT? If not check out this thread for more information on GPT and BIOS setups. If you try setting up a machine to use GPT under BIOS you soon realise that extlinux/syslinux is much less hassle. No extra dependencies to be downloaded configured and installed, no extra partitions, a saner config file format, etc. Furthermore the 'advantage' that people claim Grub2 has over Lilo (about not having to reinstall it after each kernel update) is not valid with Extlinux (plus the fact that I don't really consider that an advantage). The only thing that Grub2 currently has over Syslinux is built in EFI support. However the Syslinux guys are working on EFI support right now. Also Grub2 isn't great on EFI in any case. The EFI/GPT Guru, Rod Smith has this to say: Quote:
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I prefer lilo by far over grub2 and this is one of the reasons,as you update kernels it writes it to the start-up menu. When you dual boot windows it lists windows along with the recovery partician along with every new kernel and before long you have a dozen different choices, At that point you have to figure out a work around just to get rid of those old kernels and the restore partician. It is not a problem to add to the start-up menu but try to delete, that is where the fun starts!
By the way I did enjoy the article it was very informative! |
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LILO is dumb (RAID issues, etc) GRUB is bloated and unnecessary complicated Solution: SYSLINUX Use it on all my PC and servers for few years - works like a charm (can boot from Raid, LVM and so) |
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This way you can easy boot the weirdest configuration one can ever imagine. On my servers it is LVM on top of RAID-1 |
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