〖Android〗/system/etc/recovery-resource.dat

源代码中的解释：[platform_build/tools/releasetools/ota_from_target_files]

    # Recovery is generated as a patch using both the boot image
    # (which contains the same linux kernel as recovery) and the file
    # /system/etc/recovery-resource.dat (which contains all the images
    # used in the recovery UI) as sources.  This lets us minimize the
    # size of the patch, which must be included in every OTA package.
    #
    # For older builds where recovery-resource.dat is not present, we
    # use only the boot image as the source.

这个文件比recovery.img明显要小，从这一段描述中可以看出，这里只是装载了recovery的资源，而没有kernel。