Standard Build Unit

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A Standard Build Unit is a term coined in Linux From Scratch, and it represents the amount of time required to build the first package in LFS on a given computer. It is used as a reference to estimate the amount of time necessary to build a package.

At current moment the first package in LFS ever build is GNU binutils.

For instance, if on a given computer the binutils package was built in 10 minutes, another package estimated to build in 0.5 SBUs would require 5 minutes to build on the same computer and under the same conditions.

The binutils package is larger than most packages usually available with a Linux distribution. As such, most build times are subunitary SBUs. Among the notable exceptions are: Linux kernel, gcc, KDE.

Note: although its name contains the terms "standard" and "unit", the notion is neither. It is merely an approximation of how long one should expect for a package to build. The actual build time is heavily influenced by the load of the machine (i.e. other processes), the number of processors (i.e. SMP), etc.

[edit] History of the term

Originally, the term SBU stood for Static Bash Unit because the bash package was the first to be compiled in LFS and this package was compiled with static linking. Later the first package was changed to binutils, so the acronym stayed the same, but now stood for Static Binutils Unit. Even later one have chosen to rename the term SBU to Standard Build Unit to make it a general term independent of the name of the first package to be installed. [1]