Comment # 34 on bug 908454 from Dr. Werner Fink

(In reply to Andreas Faerber from comment #31)

There is nothing to fix as if you have a look into the code of
get_kernel_version  you will see a brut force method which search for the
string

  "Linux version "

for both little and big endian case in the binary which is ... if required ...
uncompressed with

  "/bin/gzip -dc %s 2>/dev/null"

... with the file command you can not do this, as file was not written to dump
symbols from an elf binary nor symbols from a compressed elf binary.

I've done an

  strace get_kernel_version /boot/vmlinux | & grep ^read | wc -l

on PowerPC64 and this reports  351 reads with each of 32768 bytes to find
the final "Linux version " ... this has nothing todo with magic headers of
magic marks for elf binaries. The PowerPC64 kernel probed with the file command
shows

  ELF 64-bit MSB shared object, 64-bit PowerPC or cisco 7500, version 1 (SYSV),
statically linked, BuildID[sha1]=0x88bcd91b88298c500c6127aae9a4756811267a47,
stripped