Why vmlinux.bin are changed from raw image to elf for x86 ?

March 2, 2013

      Hi All,

Recently, I found that x86 vmlinux.bin are changed from raw image to elf, we can got it from the following objcopy flags:

linux-3.7.x/arch/x86/boot/compressed/Makefile：
OBJCOPYFLAGS_vmlinux.bin :=  -R .comment -S
$(obj)/vmlinux.bin: vmlinux FORCE
    $(call if_changed,objcopy)

we can see that kbuild pass no "-O binary" to objcopy.

And I double check the vmlinux.bin as following:

linux-3.7.x/arch/x86/boot/compressed$ file vmlinux.bin
vmlinux.bin: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, BuildID[sha1]=0x7ad967473a9b36bc529551eecd326b5dfd15a426, stripped

Make sure the vmlinux.bin is elf, not raw binary. Anyone knows the rootcause ?

Thanks,
Jacky