What is SILO?

SILO, the Sparc Improved boot LOader, is a booting loader program that runs from the PROM of SPARC (32-bit) and UltraSPARC (64-bit) based systems, covered by the terms of the GNU General Public Licence. It can be used for the booting of operating systems from a variety of file systems.

• Linux
• SunOS
• Sun Solaris

• EXT2FS
• EXT3FS
• ISO9660
• ROMFS
• UFS

• Configuring and reconfiguring without re-installation

  SILO reads it's configuration file directly from the filesystem, thus changes in the configuration can be made without any need to reinstall the boot loader.

• Possibility to interact with SILO at boot time

  • Select boot paths

    You can configure SILO so you can choose what operating systems to boot, or enter a path to a device or file from the SILO prompt.

  • File name completion on the SILO prompt

    SILO has built-in support for the well-known <tab> completion as found in many shells, making working on the prompt much faster and easier.

  • Use built-in commands from the SILO prompt

    SILO has built-in versions of the cat(1) and ls(1) commands, making it possible to view files and directories and their properties on supported filesystems.

• Transparant GZIP decompression of files upon loading

  Files to be handled by SILO can be in either uncompressed or GZIP compressed format, where an initial ramdisk should be in uncompressed format.

• Make other media bootable

  You can use SILO's special bootblock to create bootable ISO-9660 images.

The Trivial Image Loader for SPARC (TILO) is also included in the SILO package. TILO is a tool for building a simple TFTP boot loader which embodies several kernel images for different Sun architectures and a ramdisk root image in a compressed form. See Using TILO for more information.