On 12/28/20 1:30 PM, redbaronbrowser via CentOS-devel wrote:
> In my experience, the prep section of building a kernel always amounts to less than 1% of the overall build time.  There is no time savings by pre-applying the patches that justifies the lack of time savings.

This started with RHEL 6, and the likely motivation was to hinder Oracle
Enterprise Linux, not to save build time.[1]  According to Wikipedia,
Oracle even provides a service breaking down Red Hat's huge diff from
upstream into individual patches, not sure how effective the Red Hat
approach is, if the goal is indeed to stop OEL.[2, last paragraph]

[1]
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Controversy-surrounds-Red-Hat-s-obfuscated-source-code-release-1200554.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux#Rebuilds