Well, there is a first time for everything. In my many years of dabbling with Linux, this is the first time I had experience a 1-minute kernel build. I achieved it by using a compilation cluster using distcc.

DistCC Monitor

DistCC Monitor

As the image shows, nearly the entire kernel compilation was distributed over a number of machines. As a result, the kernel compiled successfully in about 1-minute as measured using the wall clock.

Furthermore, the compilation cluster was not made up of super fast machines but was mainly a collection of old machines:

  • 3x Intel E5800
  • 2x Intel E2180

I used the standard Debian commands to build the latest 3.19 kernel from kernel.org which are:

make defconfig
vi .config
make oldconfig
make-kpkg --jobs 40 --rootcmd fakeroot --config oldconfig --initrd --us --uc kernel_image

Impressive achievement for a bunch of old machines used as LTSP thin clients.


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