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Comment by devilkin | Hacker News Reader

I did this, once, on a 386. Did I learn things? Definitely. Will I ever do it again? Definitely not ;)

Heh, I did this back in about 2000 or 2001 with the intent of taking an old 486 I had mounted in a relatively flat case to fit under the seat of my car and turning it into an MP3 player. The process was a lot of fun, I learned a ton, and then... I discovered that I didn't realize I'd done the entire build targeting a Pentium CPU and all of the binaries contained instructions that the 486 couldn't run.

I did not repeat the process :)

I wonder, if you were to script all the commands you ran back in the day, and ran that same script on your old 386 and on a modern system with a top-of-the-line AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, how much faster would it run?

Especially with the increase in storage performance - going from a hard disk that might have even still been using PIO modes to modern NVMe would be gigantic

The kernel is rather larger today: https://stopbyte.com/t/how-many-lines-of-code-linux-has/455/...

The same is true for all other pieces of software.

Build time will always increase until no one can be bothered to build it any more.

I think you've missed the point:

> I wonder, if you were to script all the commands you ran back in the day, and ran that same script on your old 386 and on a modern system with a top-of-the-line AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, how much faster would it run?

Implies you're compiling the 386 era versions of Linux - so the fact modern Linux is larger is immaterial.

There is a unit of compilation as part of the LSF book which lets you estimate the who build process. You only need to compile libc or some such.

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