Re: That never happened before

[Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org>]

R.Threet said:
> I did a make zImage.  Where'd "bzImage" come from?  HOW DO YOU PEOPLE
> KNOW THIS STUFF?!  ARRRGH!!  Sorry.  Thanks.

bzImage has been around since at least 2.0.x.  It makes a "big
zImage".  The zImage loader loads the kernel and uncompresses it into
the lower 640k, so you are limited to a quite small kernel.  The
bzImage loader uncompresses the kernel into upper memory, so you
should only be limited to the compressed kernel fitting into the lower
640k.

FWIW, there are a (very) few machines that are buggy and won't boot
bzImage.  Also, bzImage should theoretically boot a few nanoseconds
faster than zImage.  *But* I still generally use zImage because any
memory the kernel uses is *gone*, but if you modularize everything,
you can free up memory by unloading modules.  Generally, as far as I'm
concerned, if the kernel won't fit in a zImage, it's too big.  I'm
sure others don't feel the same.  :-)  (Maybe now that I have lots of
RAM, I'll start to care less...)

Steve
-- 
steve@silug.org           | Linux Users of Central Illinois
(217)698-1694             | Meetings the 4th Tuesday of every month
Steven Pritchard          | http://www.luci.org/ for more info

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