LILO (boot loader)
Standard LILO menu
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| Developer(s) | Werner Almesberger (1992–1998), John Coffman (1999–2007), Joachim Wiedorn (since 2010) |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
24.2 / November 22, 2015
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| Repository | lilo |
| Development status | Discontinued |
| Type | Bootloader |
| License | BSD license |
| Website | lilo |
| Developer(s) | HP |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
3.16 / March 29, 2013
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| Repository | lilo |
| Type | Bootloader |
| License | GPL |
| Website | sf |
LILO (LInux LOader) is a boot loader for Linux and was the default boot loader for most Linux distributions in the years after the popularity of loadlin. Today, many distributions use GRUB as the default boot loader, but LILO and its variant ELILO are still in wide use. Further development of LILO was discontinued in December 2015 along with a request by Joachim Weidorn for potential developers.
LILO does not depend on a specific file system, and can boot an operating system (e.g. Linux kernel images) from floppy disks and hard disks. One of up to sixteen different images can be selected at boot time. Various parameters, such as the root device, can be set independently for each kernel. LILO can be placed in the master boot record (MBR) or the boot sector of a partition. In the latter case, the MBR must contain code to load LILO.
At system start, only the BIOS drivers are available for LILO to access hard disks. For this reason, a very old BIOS access area is limited to cylinders 0 to 1023 of the first two hard disks. For a later BIOS, LILO can use 32-bit "logical block addressing" (LBA) to access the entire capacity of the hard disks the BIOS has access to.
For EFI-based PC hardware the now orphanedELILO boot loader was developed, originally by Hewlett Packard for IA-64 systems made, but later also for standard Intel IA-32 and x86-64 hardware with EFI support.
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