<jon@fork.yi.org> (Jonathan R. Hinds) writes:

> This does not seem to be too much slower. And the kernel is still taking
> upwards of 12 hours to compile.

Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet, but over the years the
compiler we ship has gotten bigger and bigger and slower and slower,
and we also have cranked up the default optimization to -O2. egcs
*crawls* with -O2. 

Are you actually convinced that you're disk-bound? Have you had a look
at iostat output while the compile is running to see if you're
compute- or disk-bound? 

On an 8M 486/66 under 1.4.1, I found that I couldn't build a kernel
with -O2. I let it run for about 48 hours before giving up; it was
just paging itself to death.

        - Nathan