[OLPC-devel] mkelfImage woes

Tue Aug 1 08:02:47 EDT 2006

I noticed we currently use the bzImage as basis for mkelfImage and I'm wondering whether we really want to do that because bzImage contains lots of code we don't need.

514264 arch/i386/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin.gz
532168 arch/i386/boot/bzImage
239754 initrd
789198 olpc-payload.elf

bzImage is 17904 bytes bigger than vmlinux.bin.gz for no apparent gain in our case. Bad.
olpc-payload.elf is 17276 bytes bigger than bzImage and initrd combined. I have no idea why (except maybe decompression code).

Can we feed arch/i386/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin.gz (or arch/i386/boot/compressed/vmlinux.bin) to mkelfImage and it will still boot? If so, we would save quite a lot of space without even changing the compression algorithm.

Regards,
Carl-Daniel
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