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Date:      Fri, 24 Mar 2000 20:03:05 -0800
From:      "Jeremiah Gowdy" <jgowdy@home.com>
To:        "Doug Barton" <Doug@gorean.org>, "Christian Weisgerber" <naddy@mips.rhein-neckar.de>
Cc:        <freebsd-smp@FreeBSD.ORG>, <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: PR #17479: parallel building of ports
Message-ID:  <000b01bf960f$0693f960$0100000a@vista1.sdca.home.com>
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.21.0003241837300.7937-100000@dt051n0b.san.rr.com>

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> > I received absolutely *no* reaction in response to PR ports/17479
> > which suggests a minimal change to allow reliable parallel building
> > (i.e. make -jX) of ports.
> >
> > I can't imagine that I'm the only person with an SMP box who cares
> > about this.
>
> You will probably get more of a reaction by goading the folks in
> -ports. :)

Hey, I'm with you all the way.  It just plain sucks when you want to take
full advantage of your dual processor setups (I have two of them) and you
get 3/4 of the way through the build (which is hauling serious butt,
especially with SMP *and* SOFTUPDATES to prevent massive harddrive head
strokes) then suddenly have your build fail because something was built out
of order.  They could at the LEAST have an option in the Makefile that said
whether it was safe to do -jX.  Then you could just set your setup to do -jX
by default, and any Makefiles that don't allow -jX (because it doesn't work
for that build) would override the option.  That would be the MINIMUM they
could do.  I honestly agree they should totally make an effort to make their
Makefiles -jX compatible.  With SMP becoming so popular as you can get a
Dual Celeron board for $120 and a pair of Celeries real cheap, more and more
people are going to be using SMP setups.  If people can't take full
advantage of their SMP, because of issues like kernel threads, or
incompatible Makefiles, they're probably going to look for an operating
system that has more flexability with SMP.  I have a dual PII 333, which
runs like a dream when programs take full advantage of it.  Apache and Samba
spawn processes, which can and do use either CPU.  I can (usually)
buildworld and installworld with -j 4.  Installworld with -j 4 and
Softupdates is absolutely amazing.  SMP can be a dream come true for people
who could never afford to buy a motherboard/cpu in the 600-700mhz range, but
can easily afford a cheap dual SMP setup.  I say at least have an option or
marking that specifies -jX compatibility, and then any of the port authors
who care enough can try to make some optimization/change to allow it when
they're ready.  Better yet, if we got a system working, that Makefiles
specify if they're multijob compatible, then make itself could detect your
SMP setup, and maybe the load conditions (and an override option), and
decide to do -jX on it's own.  There's alot more territory to be explored
here with this, and all I can say is, I hate to compile something on a
Pentium II 333, when I have another Pentium II 333 sitting there idle.



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