Re: x86 release builds are slow

[Hisashi T Fujinaka <htodd%twofifty.com@localhost>]

On Mon, 5 May 2008, Greg Oster wrote:

> M Graff writes:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > Andrew Doran wrote:
> > | I think that's simply fallacious. Yes, our kernels are too fat and we are
> > | working on that, but you would be hard pushed today to buy a new PC
> > off the
> > | shelf with less than 512MB of RAM. We're speaking of virtualization, not
> > | embedded systems or constrained systems that can just about support
> > one OS.
> >
> > Fully-loaded XEN DOMU kernels also boot slower.
> >
> > You would be hard pressed to buy an off-the-shelf x86 system that cannot
> > compile NetBSD DOMU in under 3 minutes.  We're not talking about user
> > time here, we're talking about automated build time.  Who cares how long
> > that takes, really?  I care about boot speed, and about binary size.
> > Why should I care how long it takes to build 11 kernels on beefy build
> > hardware?
>
> Because if you're like me, you'd like more people to do full builds
> before checking in changes :)  If people don't have to wait an extra
> half an hour for 11 more kernels to build, they would hopefully be more
> likely to at least do a full test build... (ok.. maybe I'm being a bit
> optimistic here :-} )

The reason I run NetBSD, and not Free*, is because I have old hardware
that only boots with NetBSD. This old hardware is not the speediest, and
sometimes I need to compile natively rather than on my faster i386
machines. Fortunately those times aren't too often, and only are
completely necessary when compiling in pkgsrc.

So compile times do matter to more of us than you think.

--
Hisashi T Fujinaka - htodd%twofifty.com@localhost
BSEE(6/86) + BSChem(3/95) + BAEnglish(8/95) + MSCS(8/03) + $2.50 = latte