Lilo refuses to install to loopback or fakeraid devices

[Phillip Susi]

I consider this to be a clear cut regression bug. There is an example in the
lilo man page on installing lilo to a loopback device. It shows that you have
to use the disk= parameter in lilo.conf to explain to lilo exactly how the bios
sees the device you want to install to, and holds the kernel. Attempting to
follow this example lilo fails to install, saying that it does not understand
device 0x700.

I ran into this bug trying to install lilo to boot up off of a sata fakeraid.
It seems that lilo has been adding support for detecting things like lvm and
mdraid and so when I used the disk= parameters to explain to lilo exactly what
the bios disk layout for my partitions, it complained that it noticed they were
mapper devices not set in raid 0 mode, which is not supported.

Having lilo auto detect the required disk parameters for raid1 is a nice
feature, but when you specify the parameters in the lilo.conf with the disk=
settings, the auto detection checks should be disabled, and lilo should do what
you tell it to.

I have sent an email to the maintainer of lilo on this issue, so hopefully it
will get resolved upstream.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

I ended up getting the current lilo sources and building it myself. It turned
out I had to use a very creative lilo.conf, and still had to make a minior patch
to the lilo sources to get it to behave correctly when the estoteric config
options I was passing were used. I will be sending the patch to the maintainer
soon.

Anyhow, I got lilo installed and right now it correctly boots windows XP, and
tries to boot linux, but the kernel panics saying it can't mount the root
filesystem. I'm not sure what the correct root=line should be to get the kernel
to mount the initramfs.

Hopefully the next release of lilo will include my patch which will allow it to
be used to boot a system from a fakeraid provided that you very carefully
configure lilo.conf. In the future adding support for proper auto detection
would be nice if possible, but I think that is a larger issue.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

I am working with the maintainer of lilo to figure out how to get lilo to
properly support fakeraid setups. In the mean time, I made a one liner patch to
get it to work, but you have to configure your lilo.conf very carefully. You
must use the use-static-bios option and the disk= options to specify the exact
bios layout of the devices you reference in the conf file.

This works right now, but really it would be nice if lilo could auto detect such
a setup and do the right thing.