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Threadripper 3960X Compiles Linux Kernel in Under 30 Seconds

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Re: Threadripper 3960X Compiles Linux Kernel in Under 30 Seconds

#51

Post by l33tman »

cesarb wrote: post #22
l33tman wrote: post #12

I was compiling the kernel for my boxes for the most part of the 90's and 00's and the funny thing is a sub-60-second compile time was always possible with the "latest gear". Like a 100 MHz pentium. Of course the number of modules you want/need to compile has steadily increased but still funny to see someone impressed with a 30 second compile time 25 years later and with a 100x+ increase in CPU power :)

The kernel has gotten bloated. Back in the day, it could easily run in 8 megabytes of RAM, with plenty left over for the userspace and cache. Nowadays, just the kernel code (before loading any modules) is already bigger than that.

I was one of the first who worked on embedded Linux, and I put the kernel and a user-space program in a device with 512kb RAM once. It was too tight to do anything useful with, but just barely. It was no problem doing useful stuff on a 2 MB device (this was in 1999) :)

Though to Linux defence, it is not nearly as bloated over this period of time as, say, Windows, by orders of magnitude. And, you aren't required to compile in everything. It's just very tedious (and frankly a bit pointless) to trim it down..

Re: Threadripper 3960X Compiles Linux Kernel in Under 30 Seconds

#52

Post by lordlimecat »

yellowapple wrote: post #36
fooker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because not everything is CPU bound.

But all the other bounds have improved massively, too: - CPUs are multiple orders of magnitude faster - GPUs are multiple orders of magnitude faster - RAM is multiple orders of magnitude faster and more abundant - Disks are multiple orders of magnitude faster and bigger - Network connections are multiple orders of magnitude faster Why is it that the end result feels the same? The answer, of course, is that software c…

No, the answer is your ssh configuration. You're hanging on timeouts, either doing DNS resolution or trying multiple auth mechanisms.

Use -vvv to find the hangup.

Re: Threadripper 3960X Compiles Linux Kernel in Under 30 Seconds

#53

Post by yellowapple »

KirinDave wrote: post #47
yellowapple wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. My top-of-the-line Threadripper 1950X is already multiple generations behind the bleeding edge; I built that machine last year , and there are already newer CPUs blowing it out of the water. It reminds me of the 90's when Moore's Law was still a Law-with-a-capital-L and I love it .

Other than benchmarks, do you actually feel this? Dev environments have gone to great lengths to reduce the total amount of compilation required and for nearly every other application, a GPU does most of the work. And if you've got a lot of ML to do, you probably would save more time with a TPU. I don't really see what the point of faster desktop CPUs are without being accompanied by substantial power use reduction.…

You're right that the individual tasks don't feel much faster. What's impressive and more relevant to me is that I can do more of them at the same time. I can have Firefox open on a bunch of tabs and a resource-intensive video game or CAD program running and Spotify and Slack and a bunch of Emacs windows and a bunch of terminal and file manager windows and even a couple VMs all at the same time, and can Alt-Tab freely among them (or even put them on separate monitors). My desktop doesn't break a sweat in the process. My previous desktop (with an early-gen i7) could handle a fraction of that under the same operating system (Slackware). My desktops before that under any operating system handled even less, as do most laptops even today.

And that's with 16 cores. The 3990X is gonna have four times that many. That's four times the number of things my computer can be doing at the same time at the same per-core load.

My work laptop, according to htop, is running 263 "tasks" right now (which I assume to be processes+threads). If AMD can in the next few years pull off another quadrupling like they're trying to do with the 3990X, then I'd be very close to being able to give every process and thread on a computer its own x86 core. That's fucking ludicrous.

Re: Threadripper 3960X Compiles Linux Kernel in Under 30 Seconds

#54

Post by yellowapple »

lordlimecat wrote: post #52
yellowapple wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But all the other bounds have improved massively, too: - CPUs are multiple orders of magnitude faster - GPUs are multiple orders of magnitude faster - RAM is multiple orders of magnitude faster and more abundant - Disks are multiple orders of magnitude faster and bigger - Network connections are multiple orders of magnitude faster Why is it that the end result feels the same? The answer, of course, is that software c…

No, the answer is your ssh configuration. You're hanging on timeouts, either doing DNS resolution or trying multiple auth mechanisms. Use -vvv to find the hangup.

I wasn't the author of the original comment. SSH ain't a problem for me. I was talking more about system responsiveness in general.

Re: Threadripper 3960X Compiles Linux Kernel in Under 30 Seconds

#55

Post by anticensor »

beagle3 wrote: post #46

It's a beast, but ... that's not a very impressive measure. Bellard strikes again - From [0], in 2004: TCCBOOT is a boot loader able to compile and boot a Linux kernel directly from its source code. It is only 138 KB big (uncompressed code) and it can compile and run a typical Linux kernel in less than 15 seconds on a 2.4 GHz Pentium 4. [0] https://bellard.org/tcc/tccboot.html [2004]

I would prefer gccboot (with gcc -march=native -mtune=native) though, because tccboot cannot optimise the output.

Re: Threadripper 3960X Compiles Linux Kernel in Under 30 Seconds

#56

Post by zamadatix »

KirinDave wrote: post #9

I don't really understand why this is newsworthy, so maybe someone could help me understand. It's a big, power hungry desktop CPU with incremental performance gains over the last generation. Why is this important? Is there some kind of architectural breakthrough these CPUs are using? Are these CPUs recovering performance lost to Spectre/Meltdown mitigation?

Just to note AMD CPUs were not affected by Meltdown in the first place.

Re: Threadripper 3960X Compiles Linux Kernel in Under 30 Seconds

#57

Post by GordonS »

ralgozino wrote: post #48
kstenerud wrote: post #28

Wow... I still remember recompiling the NetBSD kernel on my Amiga 3000 to tweak the timings on my Retina Z3. Took 14 hours to compile the kernel... So if processors are now >1500x faster than they were in 1991, why is it that my Amiga 3000 has a faster, more responsive UI? Why is it that an ssh session takes 8 seconds to establish? Why is it that browsing a network share is 10x slower than viewing a file list was on…

Edit your sshd config and add useDNS: no to it, don't forget to restart the deamon. Either way, I get your point, I remember programming in Delphi, compiling, chatting on IRC and browsing the net with a 56K Winmodem (all the modulation was software driven) with a Pentium 2 all at the same time, and now I can't even have and IDE and slack open at the same time.

I'm old enough to remember 14k, 28k and 56k modems - and while yh internet held great wonder, waiting for pages to load and files to download was really frustrating.

Oh, and having to hangup so my parents could make a phonecall wasn't fun either!

This at least is something that has got orders of magnitudes better, and is very much noticeable. At times I still shake my head in wonder at being able to download a GB in less than 2 mins on a residential FttC connection.

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