Hi.

Hope this is written in the right forum.

I tried to install 32bit slackware-current last week. Chosen btrfs as a filesystem type for root filesystem. With no success. Of course. I didn't know LILO's not able to deal with btrfs yet. Now I know it. Not even grub 0.9 from extra.

So. So why is there an option formating root as btrfs, when neither LILO, neither grub is actually able to boot from it?

Is there any other way to boot installed slackware (with btrfs root filesystem) using slackware-current installation media only?

No-one has responded, so ...

The answer (in general) is to use a separate /boot partition, formatted in a supported filesystem; usually ext[34].
Note that I haven't bothered with Slack in years, and lilo in considerably longer. Grub2 is able to boot btrfs natively - whether it is currently packaged for slack I'm in no position to say.

Since there was only one other response to this ...

As far as I know LILO doesn't deal with any file systems. The kernel deals with file systems. You need to create an initrd to handle btrfs (e.g. mkinitrd -c -k 2.6.37.6 -m btrfs -f btrfs -r /dev/sda1 ) or compile a kernel with btrfs built in. Of course you also have to then configure LILO appropriately.

I've not used btrfs myself so I'm not speaking from experience with btrfs, only from experience with other file systems.

If you've had success in the past booting from the huge kernel and not needing an initrd then perhaps the huge kernel doesn't have btrfs compliled in.

If you don't want to deal with initrd then you need to use the file systems supported by the huge kernel or recompile the kernel yourself with the file system support you need.

I would be surprised were that to be true. From what I remember the blocklist it generates was to locate the conf file, not the (entire) initrd and kernel. After opening the conf lilo would still need to locate them - which would entail understanding the underlying filesystem.
Happy to be proven wrong.

I got into the habit of using a separate boot years ago, and it proved handy when I started to use btrfs not long after Chris released it (as testing). Grub (original) couldn't talk to it either.

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LILO does use a block list to locate the kernel and initrd, but this doesn't work with BTRFS for reasons I don't know.

Currently only the latest versions of Syslinux and Grub2 can boot directly from BTRFS.

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