How vmlinux is recognized?

[Vikram Narayanan]

On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 2:03 AM, Manohar Vanga <manohar.vanga at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Vikram,
>
>> How the vmlinux (an ELF executable) is recognized by the processor?
>
> ELF is just a file format. That is, the machine instructions and data are
> stored in a specific format. The _processor_ simply recognizes machine
> instructions and this needs to be taken from the ELF file and loaded into
> memory (the instruction pointer is then pointed to the place the
> instructions were loaded).

Hope everyone here got my question wrong. I am aware that ELF is a
format and there will be specific loader for loading ELF files. Please
refer to the previous reply.

Thanks,
Vikram