Re: Patch "i386: Relocatable kernel support" causes instant reboot

[ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)]

Jean Delvare <khali@linux-fr.org> writes:

> Hi Vivek,
>
> On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 16:10:56 +0530, Vivek Goyal wrote:
>> Another odd thing is that "file vmlinux.bin" shows following.
>> 
>> vmlinux.bin: Sendmail frozen configuration - version
> \015\024\322\216\356\222X\2306\032H\220\303\270\006\007\003
>> 
>> I am not sure what does it mean. I had expected it to be a data blob.
>> 
>> "vmlinux.bin: data"
>
> The file command uses heuristics to attempt to identify files. Here a
> random sequence of bytes was simply misinterpreted as something
> completely different. You can tell from the version string which is
> totally broken. So, "file" could be improved to avoid this false
> positive, but that's about it.
>
> Now, what's still relevant is that my vmlinux.bin starts with a
> binary sequence which differs from all other vmlinux.bin files around.
> So it's a hint that it is corrupted, although a deeper analysis will be
> required to figure out how and why.

A simple analysis says vmlinux.bin is created by the linker.  So we
can probably look at why vmlinux.bin gets generated strangely.

I know I touched that path a little bit in my patch.

Eric