Linux 4.9 Is Showing A Performance Boost On More Systems

[Luke]

It's not that bad with modern CPUs. A kernel build on a fast CPU is now ~1min, and even a cheap Skylake Celeron can build a kernel in a few minutes. Automated bisecting makes the compile time even less relevant - it's trivial to "git bisect run" with a test script that compiles, pushes to and reboots the test hardware then polls for the test result.

What KIND of kernel build? A bare kernel or one with all the modules? I build my own kernels complete with full module support, using "make oldconfig" with the configuration files found in /boot from Ubuntu PPA kernels. They take over an hour on an AMD FX 8120, a CPU which is effectively optimized for my video editing loads. I now build my own kernels and cipher stack due to an article here about a possible attack against Debian's package signing system that would permit an MITM attacker to replace prebuilt binaries with their own built from modified source.