> Can someone give me a quick summary of bzImage vs zImage and why Debian > needs to use bzImage on the root disks at all? Not only does it cause > problems with some notebooks, it causes problems my desktop -- spontaneous > reboots after "Uncompressing Linux...." sometimes.
Well. It goes like this. When you boot the kernel it copies the Image from the disk to 0x1000 (about 64k). If the Image is beyond 600k then you have a problem because it suddenly will not all fit in low memory. A bzImage is more sinister. After it loads a few block in it makes some bios calls to copy the blocks up to 1 meg where the 3rd stage boot loader will run. After that it uncompresses the kernel to some location then copies it to it's proper placement at 1M. a zImage simply uncompresses the kernel to 1M. In theory, on a notebook the int calls are glitchy and crash the system. If your kernel is > 600k you MUST use a bzImage and you MUST load it into memory above a meg (ie protected mode). zImages work until that limit is reached. I'm not sure how syslinux loads the ram disk, but I think it must load it into high memory and it might use bios calls to do it.. It's also possible that syslinux is unsing an incompatible way of fiddling into protected mode that mucks things up, I've only looked at the kernel boot loader. Jason Who just today got a 200k 2.0.34 zImage kernel to boot off flash on an embedded AMD 586 from Octagon -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
