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Re:The seven second kernel compile by dripton on Thursday November 06, 2025 @12:06PM (#45837458)
It varies a lot depending on how much you have enabled. The distro kernels that are designed to support as much hardware as possible take a long time to build. If you make a custom kernel where you winnow down the config to only support the hardware that's actually in your computer, there's much less code to compile so it's much faster.

I recently built a 6.17 kernel using a full Debian config, and it took about an hour on a fast machine. (Sorry, I didn't save the exact time, but the exact time would only be relevant if you had the exact same hardware and config.) I was surprised how slow it still was. It appears the benefits of faster hardware have been canceled by the amount of new code added.

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