On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 04:41:37PM -0700, Paul G. Allen wrote:
I've compiled many kernels and on the slower machines it takes about 20 minutes. Why does it take so long with a VMWare hosted virtual machine?
One thing to keep in mind is that kernel build time will depend a lot on what you have configured. Configure options can make a kernel build range from 2-3 minutes to 45 minutes. If you use a general distribution's config file, expect to wait. The virtual machine is going to have a lot slower "disk", since it goes through the filesystem layer of the host OS and then directly to disk (unless your VM partitions are direct disk partitions). Other factors are that VMware machines tend to have smaller amounts of memory, since they are usually sharing real physical memory with other images or a host. That said, I've just run a brief comparison. The machines aren't quite the same, but are faily similar. So, a 2.4Ghz Core2 Duo running 2.6.24 with my .config takes 3:01 to build the kernel (with 5:00 CPU time, be sure to specify -j and a positive number). On a 2.66Ghz Woodcrest (which is Core1 with 64-bit) also running 2.6.24, same .config takes 4:14, which is a little bit slower, but not too bad, given the emulated disk. Dave -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
