I recently upgraded my Kernel to 2.6.20.Its working like hell(i mean GRRRR8 :-) thanks to all you people who'll are always ready to help.every thing is working fine.Here's my question which i'm asking to clear my concepts.
During Kernel installation i issued the fllowing commands(as root ofcourse):
1)cp arch/i386/boot/bzImage /boot/vmlinuz
2)cp System.map /boot/System.map-2.6.20.6
3)lilo
I just want to know what is the use of System.map file
that i copied in the /boot directory and what if i just skip the second step ?
Kindly help me know the answer to this question



Thank you

i just googled what is system.map
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System.map
gives a really good explanation. hope it's helpful for you.

It's just another file you can delete :P

OH you shouldna said that!!!

I like to confuse
(sorry :P, but really, i never ever needed it, and probably normal users won't either)

Deleting System.map won't break your system, but it is a sort of table of matches used by syslogd and klogd to report errors. So you won't be able to have logs from the kernel in case of errors.
syslogd and klogd have a very tricky method as both have "versioning" along to auto-matching features.
I mean, having the kernel version appended to System.map (ie System.map-2.6.20.4)won't hurt , but is not mandatory as syslogd and klogd are able to automagically reccognise the proper System.map matching the kernel you loaded, and they look for it first on /boot then on / and last on /path/to/kernel/sources.
Deleting System.map from your /boot directory won't stop syslogd and klogd searching for the proper file, and you probably do not notice it is missing (since it is not really missing).
hope this helps understanding
Ciao

One more post won't hurt This one's a good read...
http://www.dirac.org/linux/system.map/