Linux 7.4's development branch has merged a batch of Kbuild changes that target single-threaded bottlenecks and repeated work in the kernel build process, according to a cnBeta report. The merged work, proposed by Arm engineer and longtime kernel developer Lorenzo Stoakes, includes cutting .modinfo section allocation overhead, speeding up kallsyms generation, skipping nm output sorting when order does not matter, generating relocation information only at the final link, rewriting mksysmap in C, caching some compiler and linker capability checks in Kconfig, and preferring pigz for gzip compression when installed. Early testing cited for the full patch series showed allmodconfig builds about 36% faster, incremental builds about 70% faster and no-op builds up to about 90% faster, while Phoronix's test of v4 on a dual-socket AMD EPYC 9575F server running Ubuntu 26.04 LTS cut a clean x86_64 defconfig build from roughly 22 seconds to 15–17 seconds; the report notes those figures cover the whole series, not only the subset merged so far.