Compiling the Linux kernel, how much size is needed?

I have downloaded the newest most stable Linux kernel, 2.6.33.2.

I thought I would test this using VirtualBox. So I create a dynamically sized harddisk of 4 GB. And installed CentOS 5.3 with just the minimum packages.

I setup the make menuconfig with just the default settings.

After that I ran make and got the following error:

net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o: final close failed: No space left on device
make[2]: *** [net/bluetooth/hci_sysfs.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [net/bluetooth] Error 2
make: *** [net] Error 2

The amount of space I have left is:

# df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
                      3.3G  3.3G     0 100% /
/dev/hda1              99M   12M   82M  13% /boot
tmpfs                 125M     0  125M   0% /dev/shm

My virtual size is 4 GB, but the actual size is 3.5 GB.

$ ls -hl
total 7.5G
-rw-------. 1 root root 3.5G 2010-04-13 14:08 LFS.vdi

How much size should I give when compiling and installing a Linux kernel? Are there any guidelines to follow when doing this? This is my first time, so just experimenting with this.

An april 2010 linux kernel is about 60MB bzip2 archive, which after unpacking and compiling takes about 400-500MB.

You can check your directory size with du -hs like:

/mnt/storage/linux-2.6.33$ du -hs                               
437M    .

On my recent AMD64 build of 4.4.0-57 on Ubuntu 16.04, I needed about 14.5 GB of space for the build outputs.

That seems a a lot and it seems that is mostly transiently needed files (e.g., .o files resulting from compiling a .c file).

Refer to this link >> https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2266609

I compiled/made linux kernel 4.0.0-rc1 on my HP Stream 13 (2GB RAM, dual core Intel Celeron N2840) based on the clear instruction on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelTeam/GitKernelBuild, and this is my experience:

After the "git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git" the disk in use in the separate kernel directory: 1691 MB

During the make/compile, the disk space in use went up to 15674 MB. So: more than 15GB ...

Total compile time was: 299 minutes, or 5 hours. Quite long, probably caused by my slow CPU and slow disk.