YOU CANNOT CHANGE OR SETUP the kernels or boot entries at runtime.

Also, literally the LILO bootloader does not know about filesystems, it just read particular sectors from a particular device. That's WHY you should update it at every Kernel or device change.

Additionally, the LILO "shell" just and only gives you the ability to add particular parameters to a known Kernel entry. Nothing more.

Long story short, honestly I do not see its utility while being included in a BIOS.

For example, you should flash a new BIOS every time when you partition, add or remove a hard drive. Which is a laughable idea.

Thank you very much for this reply, Darth Vader, now I clearly see why it can't be done with the current source code of LILO (without significant modifications, at least). Have a nice day

The lilo menu is contained within the boot sector and lilo -the bootcode cannot install itself and a new menu. one needs lilo -the program for that -which needs a kernel and runtime.

About the tiny-config, I recently saw and tried that and was surprised to see that it produced a kernel around 700K. In the old days of floppies and kernel-2.x, one could easily get a bootable kernel under 400K, so it was easily possible to have a kernel with around 400K of runtime.

I suggested using grub, but I'm no fan of grub2. I'd say use a patched up legacy grub -patched for ext4 support and things like that.