Improving build times

Avoid ld 2.40 and 2.41

Recent versions of GNU binutils link papermario very slowly:

You can check your ld version with mips-linux-gnu-ld --version.

Use a better CPU

The multi-core performance of your CPU (e.g. number of threads) has a large impact on build times. The single-core performance of your CPU also has a large impact on link times.

Use a faster disk

The speed of your disk has a large impact on build times. SSDs are much faster than HDDs.

If you are using WSL (Windows), avoid working in the /mnt/ and instead work in the actual WSL filesystem (e.g. /home/). There is a large performance penalty for accessing files in /mnt/.

Use a ramdisk

If you have enough RAM, you can create a ramdisk for your build directory (ver/us/build). More...

Ccache

Ccache speeds up recompilation by caching previous compilations.

ccache is particularly effective at improving build times after header files that are included a lot are modified. For instance, it significantly speeds up builds after message files (*.msg) are modified because they generate message_ids.h, which is included in many places.

Installing ccache

• Ubuntu and derivatives: sudo apt install -y ccache
• macOS: brew install ccache

Using ccache

If you have ccache available on your PATH, ./configure will automatically use it.

You can confirm that ccache is working correctly by executing ccache -s after a build and inspecting the number of cache hits.

Build without debug symbols

Building without debug symbols can significantly speed up linking depending on your CPU's single-core performance.

Make sure you are not using the --debug configure flag.

Although the link time is better, this has numerous side effects:

• Crash backtraces will no longer include location information; they will just show addresses.
• The size of the symbol information data appended to ROM is also made much smaller.
• gdb becomes much less useful.