Appendix A. Upgrading Your Current System

83

A.5.4. Alternative Boot Loaders

If you do not wish to use a boot loader, you have several alternatives:

Boot diskette

You can use the boot diskette created by the installation program (if you create one).

LOADLIN

You can load Linux from MS DOS. Unfortunately, this requires a copy of the Linux kernel (and

an initial RAM disk, if you have a SCSI adapter) to be available on an MS DOS partition. The

only way to accomplish this is to boot your Red Hat Linux system using some other method (for

example, from a boot diskette) and then copy the kernel to an MS DOS partition. LOADLIN is

available from

ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/boot/dualboot/

and associated mirror sites.

SYSLINUX

SYSLINUX is an MS DOS program very similar to LOADLIN. It is also available from

ftp://metalab.unc.edu/pub/Linux/system/boot/loaders/

and associated mirror sites.

Commercial boot loaders

You can load Linux using commercial boot loaders. For example, System Commander and Parti 

tion Magic are able to boot Linux (but still require GRUB or LILO to be installed in your Linux

root partition).

Note

Boot loaders such as LOADLIN and System Commander are considered to be third party boot load 

ers and are not supported by Red Hat.

A.5.5. SMP Motherboards, GRUB, and LILO

This section is specific to SMP motherboards only. SMP, short for Symmetric Multiprocessing, is a

computer architecture providing fast performance by making multiple CPUs available to complete

individual processes simultaneously (multiprocessing).

If the installation program detects an SMP motherboard on your system, it will automatically create

two boot loader entries (depending on the boot loader you installed), rather than the usual single entry.

Note

Intel  Pentium  4 systems with hyperthreading will have an SMP kernel installed by default.

The two GRUB entries will be

Red Hat Linux (kernel version)

and

Red Hat Linux

(kernel version smp)

. The

Red Hat Linux (kernel version smp)

will boot by default.

However, if you have trouble with the SMP kernel, you can elect to boot the

Red Hat Linux

(kernel version)

entry instead. You will retain all the functionality as before, but you will only

be operating with a single processor.