>When's the last time you have compiled the kernel?

2010. I needed to do so for my Linux Kernel university class.

It took 8 hours on this piece of junk Pentium 4 I found in the school's e-waste bin. You know those Black Dell Optiplex machines that were everywhere like a plague.

They were days of such stress but also so much bliss.

8 hours seems unreasonably long for a p4, especially in 2010

In 2005, i compiled linux kernel in 15 minutes on AMD Duron 700. Is true that was a very optimized kernel for my architecture, but i think that the typical kernel with all modules could get 1 hour or something.

Damn, thats pretty fast. Maybe I was doing something wrong in the config step?

not sure how much can really be done wrong, worst case would probably be an allyesconfig, which is huge, and while it was still big in 2010, it was considerably less so than now

I cannot overstate how poor the performance of various P4s was at the time.

Especially if you had some crap P4 that made modern gaming laptops look well-circulated.

Given that those optiplexes also had what is called "capacitor plague", that's more literal than you might have thought.

I was also thinking the same thing when writing it ha ha.

You make two short-sighted assumptions:

1. "Nobody compiles a kernel these days". Sure, maybe not for daily use for most, but lots of people do for work and experimentation. Also, Gentoo.

2. "Everybody runs a modern CPU". Plenty of people still run decade-old hardware, and even older, because it works and in that decade objectives of PC have not significantly changed, so why would hardware?

I agree with you, but:

This driver is almost certainly not targeting 10 year old hardware.

So when you define your kernel config, you wouldn't include this driver. The new code would be entirely skipped over at compile time.

(Still think "rewrite everything in rust to solve all our problems" is a bit dumb.)

I honestly do not think the Linux Kernel team should worry too much about the very small niche of people that insist on compiling on slow CPUs. Cross compiling exists, and 99% of Linux users run a precompiled vmlinuz binary.

On the other hand, the Rust language team should do their utmost to improve the speed of their compiler.