Linux 7.4’s Build Time Performance From Optimizations But Also Larger Codebase
On one Panther Lake laptop, Phoronix measured a roughly 5% faster clean x86-64 defconfig build for Linux 7.4-rc1 than 7.3, while allmodconfig was slightly slower as the tree grew.
The test measures clean builds, not the much faster incremental and no-op paths targeted by other build-system changes; don’t generalize the result to all machines or configurations.