I wonder, if you were to script all the commands you ran back in the day, and ran that same script on your old 386 and on a modern system with a top-of-the-line AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, how much faster would it run?

There is a unit of compilation as part of the LSF book which lets you estimate the who build process. You only need to compile libc or some such.

Especially with the increase in storage performance - going from a hard disk that might have even still been using PIO modes to modern NVMe would be gigantic

The kernel is rather larger today: https://stopbyte.com/t/how-many-lines-of-code-linux-has/455/...

The same is true for all other pieces of software.

Build time will always increase until no one can be bothered to build it any more.

I think you've missed the point:

> I wonder, if you were to script all the commands you ran back in the day, and ran that same script on your old 386 and on a modern system with a top-of-the-line AMD Epyc or Intel Xeon, how much faster would it run?

Implies you're compiling the 386 era versions of Linux - so the fact modern Linux is larger is immaterial.

Heh, I did this back in about 2000 or 2001 with the intent of taking an old 486 I had mounted in a relatively flat case to fit under the seat of my car and turning it into an MP3 player. The process was a lot of fun, I learned a ton, and then... I discovered that I didn't realize I'd done the entire build targeting a Pentium CPU and all of the binaries contained instructions that the 486 couldn't run.

I did not repeat the process :)