Re: Safety of -j N when building kernels?

William Park
2002-05-22T17:24:09Z

On Wed, May 22, 2002 at 10:53:20AM -0600, Eric Weigle wrote:
> 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?

I usually do
make menuconfig
make -j3 dep
make -j3 bzImage modules
make -j3 bzlilo modules_install
where I separate the compile and install part. But, this depends on what
you are compiling. I usually have problem with Compaq and Hamradio stuffs,
so I have them commented out.

--
William Park, Open Geometry Consulting, <opengeometry@yahoo.ca>
8-CPU Cluster, Hosting, NAS, Linux, LaTeX, python, vim, mutt, tin