Re: docs on compiling kernels for miboot?

[Sven LUTHER <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 06:39:45AM -0700, Andrew Sharp wrote:
> Sven LUTHER wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 04:14:23AM -0800, Ethan Benson wrote:
> > > On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 11:15:18AM +0100, Josh Berdine wrote:
> > > > Hi all,
> > > >
> > > > I'm hoping someone will know of some miboot/kernel docs that I haven't
> > > > managed to uncover.
> > > >
> > > > The short story is that I need to know what sort of kernel images to
> > > > build for booting with miboot.  Should I tell make-kpkg "--zimage" or
> > > > "--bzimage" and either way, which image file in the resulting package
> > >
> > > bzimage is a i386 specific kludge to work around that archetecture's
> > > fundementally broken design.
> > >
> > > zImage is sometimes useful on powerpc, in this case not really.
> > 
> > zImage is just the compressed vmlinux file, isn't it ? in this case it is
> > needed for apus. That said, back then for when i was doing apus kernel work,
> 
> OMG, I forgot about apus.  I give up.  As for zImage, let's strickly
> stick to ppc, zImage is the compressed coff format kernel which has
> only one single use that I know of, and that is for the miboot
> floppy.  SPARC doesn't even need to compress their kernels, damnit. 
> vmlinux.gz is the elf format kernel compressed with gz and I'll be
> damned if I know what that is for.  Maybe bootx can handle those. 
> But why would you if you didn't have to, unless you really are that
> short on disk space or were being forced to put it on a floppy (for
> xfer) or something.

I was the one who added vmlinux.gz, back in the potato freeze time, when i had
no idea on all this, and was struggling to make working apus boot floppies. 

I needed a compressed kernel, i don't remember why, i think it was because
boot floppies insisted on creating the rescue.bin file, altough it was never
really used on apus, since the floppy disk was mostly 880 Ko ones, and could
not boot from ms-dos formatted floppiues anyway.

Sure i could have used plain vmlinux, but boot floppies was not happy with
that.

> I'm getting a headache.  Maybe if we just close our eyes tightly,
> this arch will divide, like an amoeba reproducing, into several,
> smaller arch's.  Each with their own debian distribution and
> kernel-image package.  Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahaha.  Phew.

No, only the boot loader stuff is divided here, ...

Friendly,

Sven Luther