parallel ports build

[Jonathan Noack]

No responses yet so... *ping* :)

On Thu, October 18, 2007 18:50, Jonathan Noack wrote:
> With most modern systems having 2+ cores, I was wondering if the ports
> system could make use of more than one of them.  I briefly searched the
> web and list archives and found several short discussions and the
> following page (cced author markus@):
> http://www.brueffer.de/parallel_ports_build.html
>
> The bsd.port.mk patch on that page is dated March 2004 (!) but looks
> pretty simple.  A port must set "SUPPORTS_PARALLEL_BUILD=yes" to allow a
> parallel build.  If it does, the BUILD_JOBS knob is used (either read from
> /etc/make.conf, env, or defaults to 0) and "-j${BUILD_JOBS}" is passed to
> make.  As a bonus, the patch includes CC/CXX wrapper support for
> ccache/distcc/etc.
>
> Given that not all ports successfully build in parallel, the opt-in
> approach seems reasonable.  It allows port maintainers to test their ports
> and update them if everything works well.  Even a simple pass through the
> ports tree focusing on the heavy-hitters (X, KDE, Gnome, Apache, PHP,
> MySQL, Postgres, OpenOffice, etc.) and their dependencies could make a
> significant dent in build time.  This would be most evident for new
> installs and upgrades where you are basically starting from scratch.
>
> I am far from an expert in this area so I wanted to see what others
> thought.  Is this a good approach or is there a better one?
>
> -Jon