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by jggonz 1609 days ago
I just remembered compiling an early 2.0.xx kernel on an old 386DX AT&T server that was given to me when I was a teenager in the 90s. It spent hours doing it and I loved watching gcc take several seconds to compile each file! I also recall that the hard drive in that thing must have weighed at least 40lbs. Those were fun days!

Here's an eBay item that is pretty much exactly what I had back then: https://www.ebay.com/itm/294597619526?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=...
1 comments
knorker 1609 days ago
By "hard drive" I assume you mean "computer"?

Yeach. Yeah I had two of those when they were being thrown out. MCA was a really horrible bus between ISA and PCI. I recall it not wanting to boot unless you installed drivers for all your cards into the BIOS, or something.

So not only did your OS need drivers, but your BIOS did too.

I may misremember.

Compiling the kernel was basically an overnight operation, IIRC.

But yeah they were built like tanks. Even the power switch felt like you were turning the power back on to the fences in Jurassic Park.

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guenthert 1609 days ago
> I may misremember.

Yeah, I think you do.

> Compiling the kernel was basically an overnight operation, IIRC.

When, on what hardware?

Who was it who complained that compiling the Linux kernel took always ten minutes, regardless of hardware generation? (which of course, isn't entirely true: https://openbenchmarking.org/test/pts/build-linux-kernel)

For me, on my 386DX 24Mhz with 8MiB RAM, it took about 20minutes late 92 or early 93 (SLS 1.0 -- pre 1.0 kernel), but I had to leave X11, as otherwise the machine would swap to death.

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knorker 1609 days ago
> When, on what hardware?

That may have been later, thus with a bigger kernel, but on older hardware. It was probably 386 and 486s back in maybe 2.0/2.2 kernel era.

For the specific machines in question I set up some sort of RAID0 between two 60MB SCSI drives, to be able to do much.

The reason I say overnight may be because I had machines with specs like that a few years later than you. I did run Linux to some extent since 1994 (Slackware 2.0), but don't remember the kernel compiling aspects of back then at all.

But it's a good point. I was not comparing latest kernel to latest (or even necessarily median) kernel at the time.

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