If it really takes 12 hours to compile the kernel and application on the target, I think no amount of instructions would be slower.

And it's a one-shot thing, why make people compile the kernel at all?

Start the compile, eat dinner, go to bed, breakfast, go to school, eat lunch, done. Beats fighthing with a cross compiler toolchain for a one-off job by miles.

(Reminds me of a povray benchmark I did some time ago: start the render, go on a holiday trip, wait some more, done: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/de.comp.os.linux.misc/XmdkN1... )

In the 90s I built a FreeBSD firewall using discarded PC parts. It took 10.5 hours to build world and kernel. There were 2 power outages that forced me to start over each time. I bought my first personal UPS to fix that problem. I would learn how to cross compile instead of waiting 12 hours.

At the moment this is the winning result of a competition (first person to run Qiii with the open source drivers at 1080x? At 20 fps) so there are further optimisations to be made.

Once the code has been tweaked there'll probably be an image for it somewhere.

Considering this really isn't a, "have to have it right now" type feature, it's simply easier to kick off the compile and walk away.