> When, on what hardware? That may have been later, thus with a bigger kernel, but on older hardware. It was probably 386 and 486s back in maybe 2.0/2.2 kernel

> When, on what hardware? That may have been later, thus with a bigger kernel, but on older hardware. It was probably 386 and 486s back in maybe 2.0/2.2 kernel era. For the specific machines in question I set up some sort of RAID0 between two 60MB SCSI drives, to be able to do much. The reason I say overnight may be because I had machines with specs like that a few years later than you. I did run Linux to some extent since 1994 (Slackware 2.0), but don't remember the kernel compiling aspects of back then at all. But it's a good point. I was not comparing latest kernel to latest (or even necessarily median) kernel at the time.