> I hope you'll forgive me, but I'd be much enlighten if someone could
> give me a hand wave figure for the time it takes to execute
>
> 'make zImage'
>
> on an noname box. (Please specify clock freq).
>
> I'm well aware this is a benchmark on the quality level of bogoMIPS,
> dependent on very many factors and not comparable to an Intel box, but
> it would give a nice feeling for what some of power to expect.
I think you are going to be disapointed with the numbers you get. In my
experience gcc on the alpha is quite slow. When I was building the first
versions of linux/alpha from DEC, a P90 w 32M of ram could easily beat a
200Mhz 3800 w 1G of ram compiling the kernel. I do not know if this is
because it is more work to optimize Alpha code, or if gcc is just not
optimized to run on the Alpha. I do know that gcc does not work very well
on the Alpha, and DEC was considering paying Cygnus to fix it. I do not
know if they have done so or not.
Jim