Re: Building the kernel on an SMP box?

Bill Davidsen
2006-07-28T00:58:31Z

Brian D. McGrew wrote:
> Good morning all!
>
> Currently I'm building my kernels on a Dell PE 1800 3.0GHz. My dilemma
> is that I build and rebuild the kernel about twenty times a day and even
> though it only takes about 20 minutes, that's rapidly becoming too slow!
> Today it's the 2.6.17 kernel on FC5 that I'm building with.
>
> I see all these blurbs out there about someone being able to build a
> complete kernel in under a minute or running an SMP build across
> multiple CPUS and/or multiple machines.
>
> So, to ask the group that should know the best ... What would be a
> reasonable configuration to get my builds down under five minutes or so?
> And then to go to the extreme, what kind of horsepower should I be
> looking for if I want get the build times down to say a minute or so???

I can just about make it on 2xXeons at 3.0GHz, HT enabled, 4GB RAM. But
the new "Core 2 Duo" stuff is tons faster, is dual core but no HT yet,
has better cache, faster memory bus... costs more. Some big NUMA
hardware after that,

I will guess the new cheap point is o/c Core 2 Duo 6700, and will finish
in about 7 min. Patience is a virtue.

--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
Obscure bug of 2004: BASH BUFFER OVERFLOW - if bash is being run by a
normal user and is setuid root, with the "vi" line edit mode selected,
and the character set is "big5," an off-by-one errors occurs during
wildcard (glob) expansion.