Taking full advantage of Intel Quad Core with Freebsd 7.2p2

[Doug Barton]

Steven Hartland wrote:

> #2 Not sure portupgrade in 7.2 supports -j properly yet, I know there's
> been some recent work in that area not sure who far its got.

The ports infrastructure already supports this, but you have to add
the following option to your /etc/make.conf file:

FORCE_MAKE_JOBS=	true

You will occasionally run into ports that don't build successfully
with this option, so you can overcome that per port by doing 'make
-DMAKE_JOBS_UNSAFE' for that port. It would be a big help to the
community if you could report any ports you run into that problem with
so that they can be marked in the Makefile.

For building the world if you want the system to be responsive while
you're building a good rule of thumb for -j is "<Number of cores> -1".
If you want maximum speed and don't care about using the system while
it builds then "<Number of cores> +1" will get it done a little
faster. Values much higher than that are not likely to increase speed
much, mostly due to the fact that you'll get IO-bound sooner than later.


hth,

Doug

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