I'm not too knowledgable in this area but I'm pretty sure the other two answers you've got so far are (in part) wrong. I did my first x86 install and kernel build the other day and found this info myself after trying to figure out why the x86 and ppc kernel procedures were different. (So I can confirm that all this is just a short google away. :-)
* Mark Knecht <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2003-09-15 09:57]: > I just did a kernel build of gentoo-sources-2.4.20-r7 by hand (make dep > clean bzImage modules modules_install & then copy bzImage to /boot by hand) > and I do not get the System.map, config and vmlinuz files in /boot. However, > QUESTION 1: What do these files do, and are they necessary? vmlinux is your kernel. Often necessary. System.map is the symbol map and is necessary. bzImage is a compressed file that contains both. (So you use it instead of the others.) > QUESTION 2: What is the process to create these files if I want them? Do `make vmlinux` instead of `make bzImage` - they should be in the source root. (They may actually be there after doing make bzImage - have a look - but that's what you do if you don't want the compressed image.) > QUESTION 3: What is the difference between booting from a vmlinuz file and a > bzImage file? As far as your system once it's booted - nothing. But (this is an educated guess here, someone correct me if I'm wrong) you're more likely to run out of memory during boot without the compression due to the excellent design of the peecee architecture. :-) > QUESTION 4: Does having these -r5 files impact running -r7 if the -r7 > versions don't exist and the links point to the -r5 versions? No. Cheers David -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
