Tom sez:
> No. bzImage has *NOTHING* to do with bzip2.
>
> bzImage stands for "big zImage". It is just a form of gzipped-Image that
> is bigger than 640K. The kernel has NO support for bzip2. I think I can
> add it, but it is from scratch.
Doh! Guess you are right.
> I doubt there is much interest in this. It will make booting slower and
> take more memory, with little enough space savings that most users would
> not care. And it would require having bzip2 to build a kernel.
Probably the embedded-Linux gang would be interested, though.
> I looked at it, it doesn't look too hard, and there is one other person
> who has done some of this also, but for 2.2.x. It is true that most
> standard distribution kernels won't work with tomsrtbt, because they won't
> have minix compiled in, but they in fact are usually *smaller*, not
> bigger, because they use more stuff as modules, that I compile in directly
> because it takes less space linked into the kernel than on the floppy as
> modules.
I use Red Hat 6.2 as my distro:
[doug@godzuki /boot]$ ls -l vmlinuz-2.2.14-5.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 640052 Mar 7 2000 vmlinuz-2.2.14-5.0
That's RH's default kernel. Here's my current kernel. I use modules
heavily for stuff I use, and compiled-out some of the more obscure and
unecessary things (like math co-processor emu):
[doug@godzuki /boot]$ ls -l vmlinuz-2.2.18pre2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 601992 Sep 1 18:26 vmlinuz-2.2.18pre2
Hmmm, looks like I erased all my tomrtbt images, but I think that kernel is
~500k? The newer kernels are just so big, even heavy modulation won't keep
their size similar to the older ones.
And Seth sez:
>because bzip2 is SLOW on older or low mem machines... There is a gzip
>compressed readonly fs, and it's reasonable fast (cloop, written by Paul
>Russell), and the current 2.4 has a cramfs readonly filesystem, not sure
>what it uses....
The cramfs works great on chip-based devices. A guy made a "distro" that
fits the LEM distro + Netscape (!) on a 16 meg device, so the compression
can't be very bad, although I doubt it's as good as bzip2. It is read only,
however, which makes it somewhat annoying to experiment with while running.
Douglas Bollinger
Mt. Holly Springs, PA
My other computer runs Linux.
