You mean: I've picked my system components in such a way that kernel compiles are not i/o bound. But on an average machine a kernel recompile is very much i/o bound. To the point that people will go out of their way to get large amounts of RAM and very high performance i/o subsystems into their machines. But your average i7/8G run-of-the-mill machine is going to run into the i/o bottleneck pdq. On a 32 or 64G (or even more) RAM box with an NVME drive you probably can get it to be CPU bound. On my 16G laptop with SATA SSD it very much is, the CPU is only utilized about 60% or so.

> You mean: I've picked my system components in such a way that kernel compiles are not i/o bound.

Then in your original comment, you also mean "I've picked my system components in such a way that kernel compiles are not CPU bound".