Why are there both stripped and unstripped kernel images?

[John William Garnett]

In article <101090.080740.heise1 at ibm.com> RAH at IBM.COM ("Russell A. Heise") writes:
>
> rds95 at leah.Albany.Edu (Robert Seals) writes:
>
> > AIX 3.1, real live distribution.
> >
> > Why is there both a /unix and a /unix.strip ? Can I get rid of
> > one of `em?
>
> Yes, they are the same executable. It's just that .strip has had all the
> symbols stripped out.  No, I would not recommend removing either.
>
>Russ Heise, AIX Technical Support, IBM

Surely, AIX 3.1 doesn't use both the stripped kernel and the unstripped
kernel?  Is there any real reason to keep both versions of the kernel
around?  The stripped version should always be recreatable simply by
running the strip command on a copy of the unstripped kernel
(that is, "cp unix unix.strip; strip unix.strip").  The unstripped
version should always be recreateable by rebuilding the kernel.

I suppose the main reason not to remove one of the two would be
the uncertainty of knowing which is used and which isn't.  Of course,
it is possible that AIX 3.1 does indeed use both /unix and /unix.strip.

-- 
John Garnett
                              University of Texas at Austin
garnett at cs.utexas.edu         Department of Computer Science
                              Austin, Texas