On Wednesday 26 September 2012, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

That rubbishes the idea of a single kernel though, which is to give
distros a single kernel image that they can boot on different ARM
platforms.

They want a single kernel binary that works everywhere, not one which
they need to select the right binary to work on platform X.  Yes, the
internal uncompressed bulk may be the same, but it would require
distros to carry around N different kernel images for N different
platforms.

Right. It still helps the distros ensure that they only have a single
configuration and a single binary to test, which I expect is their main
interest, but keeping multiple copies of the same binary with different
headers is a bit silly, I agree.

On PowerPC, we have a similar problem, and the way that distros usually
deal with that is to do the final link of the zImage from the post-install
stage of their rpm or deb packages, depending on the platform they are
on. In the same stage, they also link in the newly created initrd and
the device tree blob if necessary.

	Arnd