Booting the Kernel

Alessandro Rubini

rubini@linux.it

This article describes the steps that are performed to boot the Linux kernel. While this kind of information is not relevant to the system's functionality, it's interesting to see how the different architectures bring the system up.

Table of Contents
1. Copyright and Licensing
2. Introduction
3. The Computer at Power-On
4. The PC
5. Booting zImage and bzImage
6. Using Lilo
7. Using Loadlin
8. More of it
9. Booting an Alpha box
10. Booting a Sparc station
11. start_kernel and on

1. Copyright and Licensing

Verbatim copying is allowed in any media, as well as porting to a different layout as long as the text is unmodified; parts may be quoted according to normal academic practice. Other forms of derived works and translations must be approved by the author. Needless to say, the author has no exclusive rights over the facts being described and their use is not under the scope of copyright law.

Reprinted with permission of Linux Journal.

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