Chris Hewitt wrote:
Rick Stevens wrote:
B, Prasada Rao (Cognizant) wrote:
Hi friends,
I have few queries regarding Linux. Can some one give me the
response..
1. Why bootimage is called as vmlinuz ? Is there any specific reason?
"vmlinuz" is the bzip2-compressed version of the kernel. "vmlinux" is
the uncompressed version. If you were to try to create a boot floppy,
it is very unlikely you'd get "vmlinux" on it (too big), but "vmlinuz"
(the compressed version) will fit.
I've found even vmlinuz is getting too big. On this computer (AMD
K6-2, IDE disc drives but a SCSI card with CD reader and CD writer) a
mkbootdisk under RH9 is OK but under Fedora Core 1 it is too big. The
image in /tmp is bigger than a floppy.
Make sure you're building your kernel with most of the stuff as modules.
If you start compiling filesystems, SCSI drivers, ethernet drivers and
such into the kernel rather than as modules, you'll end up with a
"friggin' huge" (with appologies to Mike Meyers) kernel that won't fit
on a floppy.
Floppy-based kernels should also be uniprocessor, not SMP. The boot
floppy is normally just something to get running so you can fix the
problem. It's not normally used to run the system.