kernel presentation at ILUG on Sat.
Jason Clinton
me at jasonclinton.com
Mon May 5 16:39:54 CDT 2003
James Colannino wrote:
> I live in another part of the United States and so I wouldn't have been
> able to be there, but I have a couple questions about the kernel that I
> have been itching to figure out and was wondering if anyone could help
> enlighten me :)
>
> First, how exactly does the kernel uncompress itself? Are there a few
> lines of code at the beginning of the binary that instruct the computer
> on how to uncompress the rest? What program handles the compression
> during compilation and what sort of algorithm is used? Gzip maybe?
>
> lol I'm hoping SOMEONE can help me out with this. I haven't found much
> googling, partly because I'm not sure exactly under what terms I should
> search for, and also, I've posted similiar questions to a couple other
> user groups in my area, and no one seems to have an answer.
It depends on what make target you specified when you built your kernel.
I always use "make dep && make clean bzImage modules modules_install".
This creates a bzip2'd kernel. IIRC, the grub/lilo boot loader does the
uncompressing so if you use bzip2, you need a boot loader that supports it.
--
Jason Clinton
I don't believe in witty sigs.
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