It is possible to install and run CRUX on an Atom 410. This is a 1.6 GHz single-core mulithreaded processor (so it looks like it has two cores, but really only time-shares one core). It takes approximately 35 minutes to build a kernel on this machine, and the first system update took around a half hour. Updating something big like glibc would probably take several hours, and I would not even try build something big like firefox or libreoffice. This is also on my open fan-cooled atom board; I would not recommend trying this on an Atom netbook; it puts a heavy load on the processor and I would be very worried about overheating the netbook.
I also have CRUX running on a 2.0 GHz single-core sempron machine. Builds on this machine take almost as long as on the Atom, but the sempron never even gets close to overheating.
I decided to run some speed comparisons, using compiling a 3.15.5 kernel with the same config file on several machines. Here are the numbers:
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2.33 GHz core2duo 7 minutes
2.5 GHz athlon x2 10 minutes
2.0 GHz sempron 24 minutes
1.6 GHz atom 35 minutes
2.0 Ghz celeron 46 minutes
Romster on CRUX IRC mentioned using distcc for big compiles, so that was my next experiment. distcc allows you to share a compile job among two or more machines, and can make a large or small difference, depending on the linked machines, and on the job itself.
I used the same 3.15.5 kernel build as a test, and here are some numbers:
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core2+sempron 5m25s
core2+athlon 4m14s
core2+athlon+sempron 4m7s
core2+athlon+sempron+atom 3m46s
core2+atom 5m44s
Romster told me that all the distcc machines have to be using the same version of CRUX, but I'm not sure if this means they have to be using the same version of distcc and gcc, or if the reasons are deeper than that. At any rate, I think the next time I have a big update (or even a kernel build) I will try distcc with the Athlon and Core2 working together.
references:
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/4874/
https://code.google.com/p/distcc/