LILO (boot loader)

LILO does not depend on a specific file system, 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 even be used as the master boot record.

At system start, only the BIOS driverss are available for LILO to access hard disks. For this reason, in very old BIOSes, the accessible area is limited to the cylinders 0 to 1023 of the first two hard disks. For later BIOSes, LILO can use 32-bit "logical block addressing" to access practically the entire storage of all the harddisks that the BIOS allows access to.

While LILO was the de-facto bootloader for Linux distributions in the early years of Linux's popularity, it has lately become a second choice in favour of the GRUB bootloader.

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