Safety of -j N when building kernels?

[Eric Weigle <ehw@lanl.gov>]

Ok, stupid question of the moment-

I always read about the kernel compilation benchmarks people run on the
ultra-snazzy new machines, but do people actually run the kernels thus
generated?

I have visions of a process being backgrounded to generate some files, and
not completing before the one of the old files gets linked into the kernel
(because not all files were listed as dependencies, for example).

So are the kernel's current Makefiles really SMP safe -- can one really
run multiple jobs when building Linux kernels? Any horror stories, or am
I just paranoid?


Thanks
-Eric

-- 
--------------------------------------------
 Eric H. Weigle   CCS-1, RADIANT team
 ehw@lanl.gov     Los Alamos National Lab
 (505) 665-4937   http://home.lanl.gov/ehw/
--------------------------------------------