daniele wrote: > Simple question : does anyone know why in a standard debian installation > the developers chose to add these two links (initrd.img and vmlinuz) in > the root partition ? Are there any specific needs or something ? It is tradition. In the old days the Unix kernel would be placed there at /vmunix (or even other older names before vm kernels). Therefore the natural place on a Unix-like system for the linux kernel is /vmlinux. Then it became compressed with gzip and so /vmlinuz and then versions were added and so forth. But having files flat in the root of the system isn't very well organized. Therefore in later years systems moved their kernel files to subdirectories. HP-UX puts it in /standalone for example. On systems that follow the FHS standard these files are put in /boot. http://proton.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#BOOTSTATICFILESOFTHEBOOTLOADER The default lilo bootloader configuration and configuration scripts look for files at the top level. And so the tradition continues with putting files there for compatibility with old lilo configurations. But this isn't needed with the configuration supplied with, say, grub. The default grub installation looks at files in /boot and doesn't need anything in the top level. Therefore on a grub booted system those symlinks at the top level can be removed. However the kernel packages post install scripts will create them automatically unless you tell them not to do so with do_symlinks=No. See the man page for kernel-img.conf(5) for details. Bob
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