[H-GEN] Rebuilding kernel modules

Tony Nugent tony at linuxworks.com.au
Sat Jun 8 22:21:31 EDT 2002


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On Sun Jun 09 2002 at 10:52, Steven McIntyre wrote:

>   As a sidenote, I'm sure a few have told me stories about kernel compiles
> on their old 386/486 systems with 4mb of RAM that compiled for more than
> 2 days...

It wasn't that bad :-)

My first linux box was a trusty old 386/8Mb which ran a 1.2.13
kernel [1] that used to take 2hrs 42min to compile.  (+/- ~5min)

I too also heard of horror kernel compiles taking that long.
Personally I think it is all a myth hanging around from overstated
comments in the old kernel-howtos.  Even on a 368sx25/4Mb (about the
slowest of the slow) the compile would have been busy running
overnight with the result there ready for you to test the following
morning.  Mind you, the kernel was (still is) a smallfry ompilation
in comparison with some other software packages (XFree86, emacs...)

When I finally upgraded it to a P200/64Mb, it totally blew me out to
see the same job done within 10 minutes!

Interesting now that I've got a PIII650/512Mb with a scsi subsystem,
I'm noticing that a full compile ("make dep clean bzImage modules")
is now stretching out to close to an hour.  Heh, that doesn't take
into account that it can take that long again to *configure* it with
"make {menu,x}config".  It says a lot about how such a big and
complex beast the kernel has become. [2]

Cheers
Tony

[1] I got so bored I used to time it :)  Around 1996, 1.2.13 was the
    "latest stable" kernel for more than 18 months.  And it did have
    a reputation for being very stable (once you found the right set
    of non-official patch fixes for it:)

[2] The tarball (.gz) for the 1.2.13 kernel was around 2.5Mb (less
    than 10% of the size of the 30Mb kernel-2.4.18 sources!)

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