Re: Safety of -j N when building kernels?

James Stevenson
2002-05-22T22:26:50Z

> The only major issue I've seen is the build may fail if you run out
> of file handles, or other resources. The build will fail with an
> "unable to fork" error. When I was at VA Linux I often compiled kernel
> for use with a make -j 16, or -j 8. I seem to remember having to play
> with ulimit, and /proc/?/file-max to get enough file handles.
>
>
> PS- You should also consider logging the output of your compile to a
> file. As your other jobs will continue for sometime before the make
> fails. Often preventing you from easily finding the actual compile error.

of course you should only really need to log the stderr or redirect stderr
to somewhere you can see it.