Talk:Vmlinux

I've tried to destub this article a bit, please revert any mistakes. I didn't think it was nescessary to create seperate articles on vmlinuz, bzImage, zImage, etc, so I removed any links like that, perhaps we should redir them here? -- taviso 02:49, 28 Jan 2005 (UTC)
 * Nevermind, Andrevan took care of it...Thanks!. -- taviso 15:04, 1 Feb 2005 (UTC)

vmlinux or vmlinuz?
the article explains why the kernel should be called "vmlinux" ("The name vmlinux is a mutation of vmunix."), but actually iy used to be "vmlinuz":
 * but by convention it is called vmlinuz or zImage.

what's the origin of this "z"?
 * I thought the 'z' was used simply to differentiate a compressed kernel image from a non-compressed image. --Brolin Empey 03:29, 2005 September 11 (UTC)

can someone describe how to make vmlinux file from vmlinuz ? thanks.

vmlinuz is not the same as vmlinux
In all fairness, I think there should be more of an emphasis on the differences between vmlinux and vmlinuz on this page. To me it also seems wrong to redirect vmlinuz to vmlinux seeing as one is compressed and bootable and the other uncompressed and unbootable.

And to answer the question how to make a compressed kernel, "make bzImage" is the way to do it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.85.206.228 (talk) 15:35, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Boot process image
In its current version, I don't understand the boot and decompression process diagram given (where is the time flow, what is on the x-axis, why is there a separation between real mode and protected mode etc.). Can someone explain it better? --Abdull (talk) 17:00, 6 March 2010 (UTC)
 * I think the time flows from left to right, and the line in the middle shows the point in the boot process where the processor is put into protected mode, which is needed to load the kernel into its final location. But there is something that isn't clear from this picture, and that's which boot process is used, the older zImage or the newer bzImage process. I'm not sure but I think the bzImage boot process doesn't move the kernel to 0x1000 as an intermediate step, but decompresses it at 1 MB with BIOS routines? CodeCat (talk) 16:00, 23 September 2011 (UTC)

Quality of the article
First, I should like to state that I think the article is fairly nicely written. Hopefully we can retain the quality of the article.

Perhaps a few more tables or pictures as overview, in particular how it (aka vmlinux/vmlinuz) relates to the boot process, but these are minor issues; the article is fine as-is.

The reason why I came to this article just now is because I am in the process of manually updating glibc. I have self-compiled kernels, all under /boot, and I wondered whether they will work if glibc is changed. According to the article it seems to be that way, but I am still not 100% sure, so if someone with knowledge could add this information to the main article, it would be appreciated. As said, I think it is that way, but I have not yet tried the upgrade myself, so I am just describing my use case for visiting the article right in this moment, right now. 2A02:8388:1641:8380:3AD5:47FF:FE18:CC7F (talk) 11:06, 9 June 2020 (UTC)