Re: Building the kernel on an SMP box?

From: Bill Davidsen
Date: Thu Jul 27 2006 - 21:03:58 EST


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@xxxxxxx>
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.
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