Re: zImage on 2.6?

From: Brian Gerst
Date: Tue May 03 2005 - 13:48:51 EST


Wakko Warner wrote:
Please keep me CCd

Rick Warner wrote:

On Monday 02 May 2005 09:29 pm, Wakko Warner wrote:

Is it possible to use zImage on 2.6 kernels or is bzImage required?

Why do you need the zImage anyway? Maybe there is another way around the problem you are having. Can you post what you are trying to do (end goal) ?


This is a little project I'm doing to beable to load a system onto a hard
drive. The linux system is short lived by design and will run out of a
tmpfs root populated by various tgz files found either on CDs or a USB
stick.

My goal (which I realize may not be achivable nor is it important in the
long run) is to get the kernel and the initrd onto a single floppy disk
(Currently, I'm ~80kb too large for this).

I decided (remembering 2.2 days and prior when zImage was normally used) to
try zImage to see what happened. I was going to compare the size of the
resulting images. That's when I hit the problem.

I understand that upx can compress the kernel better and I also remember
hearing about utilizing bzip2 as the compressor for the kernel and initrd
images.

As far as my question, it still stands. Is bzImage required (i386/x86) for
a 2.6 kernel?


More or less yes. As you're finding out, it's very difficult to build a functioning 2.6 kernel that fits the size requirements of the zImage format. Really, the zImage format is not needed anymore. It was only kept around because a small number of ancient BIOSes failed to load the bzImage format with the now defunct floppy boot block. There is no size difference in the resulting zImage or bzImage, only the load address is different.

--
Brian Gerst
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