3 ms·
> a typical Linux kernel in less than 15 seconds on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. Hah! In 2004 (last news) maybe, and I wonder which featureset. In fact, it's been a l
by AceJohnny2 12y ago
> a typical Linux kernel in less than 15 seconds on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4.
Hah! In 2004 (last news) maybe, and I wonder which featureset.
In fact, it's been a long time since I've compiled the kernel myself [1]. I wonder how long a minimal kernel takes to build nowadays. Of course, I guess "minimal" is even more ambiguous today than it was back then...
[1] Back in the day, "recompile your kernel" was the Linux joke answer to problems the way "try turning it off and on again" was for Windows...
- agumonkey 12y agoI wanted to reverse tccboot to port it to recent kernels, unfortunately it's far above my skills (far^far), I wonder if anyone attempted such a thing.
- teraflop 12y agoOn an i3 machine with plenty of RAM and an SSD, and GCC 4.9, a recent kernel builds in about 3.5 minutes. That's using the "defconfig" target, which is pretty bare-bones (only ext4, very few device drivers or fancy new features). As another data point, Debian's kernel configuration on the same hardware takes 26 minutes to build.
- userbinator 12y agoOne of the other benchmarks linked to on the page shows tcc compiling 10x faster than GCC 4.9 -O0 running on the RPi, and 41x faster than GCC -O3: http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/tinycc-devel/2013-02/msg00043.html http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/tinycc-devel/2013-02/ms... I think 3.5 minutes down to less than 15 seconds for a recent kernel is probably possible. On the other hand, tcc generates code which runs 3.5x slower, so you'd have to be doing a lot of compiling and not much running for it to save any time. JIT'ing the kernel is a fun exercise, nonetheless.