how to uncompress vmlinuz?
 

i want to uncompress vmlinuz to vmlinux, while "gunzip" doesn't work

how can i do it ? vmlinuz -> vmlinux

I believe that you want the Unix tool (works quite like gunzip)

i install the tool (uncompress)

and uncompress vmlinuz

but it also can't work
with the error message: "vmlinuz-2.4.20-8: not in compressed format"

Looking at the file, it seems to consist of at least two sections catenated together.

The first section is a header that loads the compressed image into memory. The second section is compressed with either compress or bzip2, depending on if you did a “make zImage” or a “make bzimage”.

This isn't going to be a simple conversion; the “header” is different (contains a different uncompression algorithm) for compressed and uncompressed kernels.

The easier way is probably to rebuild the kernel. To do that, boot from it, cd to the kernel sources and run Or is there some reason why you don't want to recompile?

how about trying this:

gzip -d (if gunzip happens not to be installed).

hope it will help.

I guess the question should be 'why do you want to uncompress vmlinuz?'

the kernel is compressed in such a way to be self uncompressing, right, so it's in two parts like a self extracting exe...

I'm not sure they use bzip2 on the kernel either.... I think make bzImage is just short for big zImage - which allows the kernel to load into higher memory without any size limitation like you used to get trying to fit the kernel into the low 640 k area ....

thank you all

i want to find out the symbol in the kernel which appears in a uncompressed mode(like vmlinux)

but some distribution doesn't have file vmlinux

so i want to uncompress vmlinuz

for this purpose, i don't want to recompile the kernel

i also try "gzip -d", it doesn't work either.