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Interesting, I thought bzImage contained a bzip2ed image - vmlinux.bin to (I assume) vmlinux.bin.bz2. This shows vmlinux.bin.gz. I really should RTFMakefile, b
by sounds 15y ago
Interesting, I thought bzImage contained a bzip2ed image - vmlinux.bin to (I assume) vmlinux.bin.bz2. This shows vmlinux.bin.gz.
I really should RTFMakefile, but I'm too tired after eating lots of turkey...
- DiabloD3 15y agoI'm a little fuzzy on it, but its named gz for historical purposes due to boot loaders. There is even lzma2 compressed images, and they are still named .gz afaik (which admittedly is less than it should be).
- ars 15y agoNo it stands for "Big Zipped Image". Nothing to do with bzip2. The choice of compression is not encoded in the filename. http://www.kernel.org/doc/menuconfig/init-Kconfig.html#HAVE_KERNEL_LZO http://www.kernel.org/doc/menuconfig/init-Kconfig.html#HAVE_...
- adestefan 15y agoI think the bzImage kernel image file might predate the release of bzip2. I'm not sure where to lookup when the kernel source first built a bzImage though.
- sjs 15y agoBefore it was the Big Zipped Image it was the Zipped Image, zImage or vmlinuz. Google has results as far back as 2001 or 2002 for vmlinuz so it's safe to say the tradition predates bzip2. It's worth noting that Linux can in fact use bzip2 today, and the resulting image is still typically called bzImage.
- caf 15y agoI think bzImage and bzip2 were approximately contemporaneous - I certainly remember using bzip2 in the late 90s (it was not real fast on a P90!).
- sjs 15y agoOh, it is older than I thought. Wikipedia says version 0.15 was released in 1996. Either way "bz" stands for Big Zipped and is unrelated to bzip2.