[l33tman]

I was compiling the kernel for my boxes for the most part of the 90's and 00's and the funny thing is a sub-60-second compile time was always possible with the "latest gear". Like a 100 MHz pentium. Of course the number of modules you want/need to compile has steadily increased but still funny to see someone impressed with a 30 second compile time 25 years later and with a 100x+ increase in CPU power :)

[cesarb]

The kernel has gotten bloated. Back in the day, it could easily run in 8 megabytes of RAM, with plenty left over for the userspace and cache. Nowadays, just the kernel code (before loading any modules) is already bigger than that.

[l33tman]

I was one of the first who worked on embedded Linux, and I put the kernel and a user-space program in a device with 512kb RAM once. It was too tight to do anything useful with, but just barely. It was no problem doing useful stuff on a 2 MB device (this was in 1999) :)

Though to Linux defence, it is not nearly as bloated over this period of time as, say, Windows, by orders of magnitude. And, you aren't required to compile in everything. It's just very tedious (and frankly a bit pointless) to trim it down..

[xenospn]

Everybody knows the REAL test is a FreeBSD 'make world' anyway :)

[basementcat]

I used to think 'make world' on BSD was some big deal until I started to synthesize HDL code to bitfiles or GDS.

[Scipio_Afri]

What is GDS in this context?

[the-dude]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GDSII

File format commonly used for wafer masks.

[jandrese]

Compiling Firefox or Wireshark or Libreoffice all work the machine harder than a make world.