What is "vmlinux"

On Linux systems, vmlinux is a statically linked executable file that contains the Linux kernel in one of the object file formats supported by Linux, which includes ELF, COFF and a.out. The vmlinux file might be required for kernel debugging, symbol table generation or other operations, but must be made bootable before being used as an operating system kernel by adding a multiboot header, bootsector and setup routines.