how to speed up port make??

[Chad Perrin]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 08:41:15PM -0400, kpneal at pobox.com wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 01:06:33AM +0200, Polytropon wrote:
> > On Wed, 25 Jul 2012 18:59:56 -0400, Sean Cavanaugh wrote:
> > > Got you beat. Compiled world on a 100MHz Pentium with 40 MB of RAM.
> > 
> > I think I can: FreeBSD 4 on a Pentium 1 with 64 MB EDO RAM.
> > The make buildworld took 24 hours. The kernel itself, if I
> > remember correctly, required 3-5 hours, of course without
> > much tweaking. :-)
> 
> Luxury!
> 
> I once compiled a custom kernel of NetBSD/i386 on a 486 with 8MB of RAM.
> I was stuck with the GENERIC kernel which took up over 6MB just to boot.
> 
> It took over 40 days to finish. 
> 
> To be fair it didn't help that I had to move out of my apartment in the
> middle. So it took some time for make to refigure out where had been in
> the build.
> 
> Heck, we used to compile gcc and watch movies. It took three movies to
> get through a full recursive compile of gcc. Yep, 6 hours.
> 
> And then there was that occasion one night watching a guy logged into an
> Ultrix box: Raise your hand if you've ever seen 'ps' report that it had
> itself been swapped out. Yep, again.
> 
> Ah, good times.
> 
> I think I still have some memory _chips_ (zip scrams, not dips) around
> here somewhere....

You kids have got it easy.  I used to have to compile by hand with a pair
of tweezers, bar copper wire, a magnifying glass, and a potato with two
pieces of metal stuck in it as a power source.

-- 
Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]