By @michaellarabel
Publication Date: 2026-06-10 13:30:00
NVIDIA engineer Kyrylo Tkachov posted a patch for testing yesterday to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for conducting a native bootstrap. The time spent in the configure process for native GCC builds is reduced by around 43% while the overall bootstrap wall time is lowered by around 15%.
Performing a GCC bootstrap ends up running Autoconf configure during each of GCC’s three build stages. But with the configure scripts executed serially and being quite time consuming in the case of the GCC compiler with its large codebase, it ends up being a significant amount of time spent.
The proposed patch is to cache the configure results so that they can be used across the three compiler stages of GCC, thereby avoiding a lot of time spent in the serial script execution. In the case of native bootstraps rather than cross-compiling, the configure scripts shouldn’t change.
On an unnamed “large multi-core AArch64 machine” that is more than likely NVIDIA Vera, Kyrylo Tkachov noted that around 30% of the wall time spent during the compiler bootstrap is spent running configure scripts and is bound at under 15% machine utilization for nearly half the build process.
The end result with the initial patches:
“This roughly halves the time spent in configure (about a 43% reduction) and cuts the overall bootstrap wall time by about 15%, with no change in the generated configuration: the produced config headers are identical to a non-cached…
