From the course: Advanced Linux: The Linux Kernel

Where's the kernel? - CentOS Tutorial

From the course: Advanced Linux: The Linux Kernel

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Where's the kernel?

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- [Instructor] Let's look at a kernel. If we go to the boot directory and do a list we see a bunch of stuff, including some vmlinuz files. In particular, the ones we're interested in is the one for the kernel we're booted in now. And we can find that out with the uname -r command. So there is a vmlinuz-5.3.0-29-generic. That's the kernel we're booted into right now. Let's look at the size of that file. That's a little over 11 meg. Yeah, moderate size but not huge. It's compressed. If it were uncompressed and had debugging symbols and so forth it would be much larger. But that file, the vmlinuz file, is going to be loaded into memory by GRUB and GRUB will transfer control to it. Don't delete that file. It's not being used right now because it's been loaded into memory but if you deleted it, when you tried to reboot there'd be trouble.

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