Question about elilo upgrade
 

Hello guys,

I have two pc upgraded to slackware-64 current from Sun Nov 19 03:36:30 UTC 2017

First PC when I upgrade to current from Tue Nov 21 05:05:41 UTC 2017 my server that use EFI stop boot. After a day reading I just reinstall it with latest slackware current downloaded from Alien BOB. Few days later on I read on forum that after upgrade to :
a/elilo-3.16-x86_64-5.txz: Rebuilt.
Double the allowable kernel image size from 8MB to 16MB.
Thanks to Didier Spaier.
Patched eliloconfig to work with MMC devices. Thanks to zerouno.

package does not overwrite automatic file elilo-x86_64.efi from boot directory to /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.efi and that was why my first pc does not run after upgrade.

My question is: Do I correctly understand or something else was the problem, because I want to upgrade next pc to current and it's is with efi boot too, but have a data and I'm unable to backup it if something is happened like other one.

Whenever there is a kernel upgrade you need to run as root eliloconfig, which will copy the new kernel (and possibly initrd) in /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware, before rebooting.

The file elilo.efi in the same directory won't need to change, as this bootloader can handle any kernel mentioned in elilo.conf, provided it can be found in the EFI System Partition (which is why the kernel needs to be copied there).

I did not do this when I upgraded kernel from 4.4.14 to 4.4.88, I just copied the kernel and initrd files by hand and that didn't break the system. Does eliloconfig do anything else besides copying those files to the EFI partition?

I also like FlinchX just copy the kernel and everything was fine while upgrade to other kernels 4.14.0, 1 or 2, but it's seems something happened after elilo-3.16-x86_64-5.txz because pc just restart when try to boot kernel.

I wonder if having rEFInd would help when elilo gets ruined for any reason (since rEFInd can boot a kernel directly).

Yes. When run for the first time it creates the partition /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware.
Also, it copies /boot/elilo-x86_64.efi as /boot/efi/EFI/Slackware/elilo.efi every time you run it.

So...

You are missing the new lilo-x86_64.efi that can cope with bigger kernels. Run eliloconfig or manually:

Thanks for explanation.