7.12. Building a bootloader
On x86 and x86_64 (multilib) architectures, the preferred bootloader is Grub. Unfortunately, Grub doesn"t work on x86_64 Pure64 - the stage2 files can be correctly built as 32-bit, but the grub shell is a 64-bit program, and tries to execute some of the stage2 routines - this results in a segmentation fault. Therefore, in the final system we use Lilo as the bootloader.
If you already have a bootloader, such as Grub, installed on the system then you should use that to make your new kernel bootable.
![[Note]](../images/note.png)
Note
We will now cross-compile Bin86 and Lilo - these instructions assume you are using an x86_64 machine (e.g. booted fron a Live CD), either pure64 or multilib. This approach will not work if you are running the machine as i686, because a 32-bit kernel will not be able to execute a 64-bit binary to install the bootloader. If that is the case, you will need to install an i686 bootloader on the host system.