[Discuss] Linux Kernel Building

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

Me again, thank God at least on a different topic.


I'm playing with kernel builds for the first time in a zillion years. (I 
need to remember stuff I once knew, for a possible job?)

Of late I have been lamenting that my current computer is under-powered, 
mostly not enough RAM. And now I'm going to start trying to compile 
Linux? On this wimpy machine? Am I trying to torture myself?

Well, guess what: Once I quit Chromium, my 8GB machine has *plenty* of 
RAM for kernel compiles. On a "-j8" make 46% of my RAM gets to be cache 
and buffers. If I want still more, I could quit Thunderbird. 
(Thunderbird doesn't seem to be designed for efficiently handling tens 
of thousands of messages in my inbox, huh.) Or I could quit Signal. (A 
"modern" program, therefore it needs a half GB of RAM to just sit there, 
doing nothing.)

Sure, with only 4 cores, not burning an excess of GHz's, this 
always-was-modest machine will still take some time, with the fan 
running, warming my lap, to build kernel, and a Debian-worth of modules, 
from scratch. But a shortage of RAM isn't my problem.

I imagine a fancier Framework computer would be noticeably faster, but 
this XPS-13 isn't a bad machine for kernel work, even if it can barely 
web surf.


-kb


P.S. Making a full load of Debian modules did take a half-hour. But that 
results in nearly 4,000 .ko files, not trivial effort. And time to 
restart Signal.