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What could end up being one of the biggest Linux kernel features of 2022 is the recently released “Fast Kernel Headers” effort to clean up kernel headers and dramatically speed up Linux kernel builds for both. absolute / clean and incremental builds. Fast Kernel Headers can cut Linux kernel build time in half or more and this weekend, the v2.
Last week, Ingo Molnar submitted initial work on Fast Kernel Headers to reduce Linux kernel build time by 50-80%. The 2,300 or so fixes clean up “dependency hell” from the kernel and completely rework the header file hierarchy. Ingo had been working on this patch set for over a year and probably the biggest “feature” of the Linux kernel.
This Saturday, Ingo sent out the Kernel Headers v2 patches as an update series. With the v2 patches, the code has been rebased to the upstream state of Linux 5.16-rc8 and in particular, there is now support for building with the LLVM Clang compiler rather than just GCC as was the case for patches original. There are also bug fixes, header optimizations that can speed up the build of the RDMA subsystem by an additional 9%, thus reducing linux / sched.h header usage and various other fixes and code improvements.
With LLVM Clang support, Ingo has measured this round of fixes to speed up the kernel build process by 88%! The 88% improvement in build time when using Clang with this patch set is very impressive and slightly ahead of the benefits found with GCC or in CPU time was a 77% improvement.
The speed of Fast Kernel headers … (Photo: AMD 2018 Italy @ Ferrari event)
See the v2 fixes for those interested in this Fast Kernel Headers job. It will be very interesting to see what happens to this patch set and its hope in the not distant future to dramatically reduce kernel build times.
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