kernel presentation at ILUG on Sat.

[Jason Clinton]

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.