Ah! I finally have a progress bar that doesn't stall the build!
- pipe size in Linux is only 8*512=4096 bytes
- pipe size is not setable
- when the feeding process spits out data faster than the eating
process can read it, then the feeding process stalls after 4KiB
of data sent to the pipe
- for us, the progress bar would spawn a sub-shell every line,
and the sub-shell would in turn spawn a 'date' command.
Which was sloooww as hell, and would cause some kind of a
starvation: the pipe was full most of the time, and the
feeding process was stalled all this time.

Now, we use internal variables and a little hack based onan offset
to determine the elapsed time. Much faster this way, but still
CPU-intensive.

 --- gcc-4.1.2.orig/gcc/Makefile.in	2006-11-01 15:40:44.000000000 +0100

 +++ gcc-4.1.2/gcc/Makefile.in	2007-03-04 23:34:32.000000000 +0100

 @@ -2522,7 +2522,7 @@

  # FIXME: writing proper dependencies for this is a *LOT* of work.

  libbackend.o : $(OBJS-common:.o=.c) $(out_file) \

    insn-config.h insn-flags.h insn-codes.h insn-constants.h \

 -  insn-attr.h  $(DATESTAMP) $(BASEVER) $(DEVPHASE)

 +  insn-attr.h  $(DATESTAMP) $(BASEVER) $(DEVPHASE) gcov-iov.h

  	$(CC) $(ALL_CFLAGS) $(ALL_CPPFLAGS) \

  	  -DTARGET_NAME=\"$(target_noncanonical)\" \

  	  -DLOCALEDIR=\"$(localedir)\" \