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.
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