Re: mkvmlinuz: how to use?

[Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr>]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 02:19:02PM -0300, Leandro Guimaraens Faria Corsetti Dutra wrote:
> 	Google did not help me, nor the list archives.
> 
> 	What is exactly mkvmlinuz, and how to use it?
> 
> 	What I could gather is that it puts a reduced version of the
> kernel somewhere in OpenFirmware, so one can do without yaboot.  But
> then how to boot?

When you build a kernel, you either build the vmlinux file, which yaboot and
quik use, or you build a zImage.chrp or .prep or so (try googling for those),
which include a compressed version of the same vmlinux file, plus a small chrp
or prep or coff or whatever mini-bootloader whose code you will find in
arch/ppc/boot, and which may include also an initrd in the same file.

mkvmlinuz is just a smallish shell script, which provided the kernel-image you
are using includes support for mkvmlinuz, in which is copies most of the
object files built in arch/ppc/boot and a few more into /usr/lib/kernel-image-*
so the last step of the linking can happen at kernel-image install time, so
you don't need to have a -pmac, -prep, -chrp and -chrp-rs6k kernel as we used
to have in older 2.4 times.

If you are purely a yaboot or quik user, you can just plain ignore mkvmlinuz,
and as it is just a smallish script, it will not bother you otherwise.

Hope this helps.

Friendly,

Sven Luther