Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 24286
The RH 7.0 version of LILO is broken for serial consoles
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:30:46 EDT
The LILO that ships with RedHat 7.0 does not work correctly on a serial console. LILO prints: LILO\n but does not permit you to select a kernel image. Upgrading to a recent version of lilo (lilo-21.6 seems to work fine) solves the problem. John Coffman, the current maintainer of LILO, had the following to say about the problem: > RedHat has taken a divergent approach to LILO, starting with the 21.4.4 > code and adding the PCX (VGA only) interface.
This is a known bug. If you comment out message= (the graphical menu), the selection should work again.
I'm going to re-assign this to msw. It seems to me that since the answer is not to use the VGA message screen on a serial console machine, then there should possibly be an option in the installer that allows us to disable the generation of the VGA message in the lilo.conf file during install. Matt?
An another solution might be to hack lilo so that if you append parameters such that serial console would be enabled, or give serial= setting, message= would automatically be disabled.
We can have the installer not put message= when it knows that you're on serial install. I think I'd like to get on mainline LILO, though.
Many people (including us, for example) install from standard console but put secondary/primary console settings in afterwards. I agree diverging will not be pretty in the long run. Lilo requires great deal of attention.
Getting rid of message= when the install is on a serial console is a quick, easy hack to solve this problem for hard core serial console users, where serial console may be the only method of access after a remote install (we frequently install RedHat via two-kernel monte on remote systems, doing a full install without even a redhat CD or a floppy). The real solution, as others have noted, is merging back to the mainline LILO and getting all of the other benefits that that provides (LBA support etc).
lba support is in the lilo we have already, and the menuing code is much much different in mainline.
*** Bug 50781 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Reassigning
*** Bug 16749 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
anaconda does the right thing for this case now