The real use of MAKEOPTS=j2 and higher

Emperor

I just installed gentoo 1.3b on my dual athlon-mp machine. (installed without a hich btw.. except for some problems with GRUB and the order of my scsi disk vs ide disk

)

I put my makeopts on j5.
I am currently compiling X and KDE etc. While I am doing this, I was running top in an other console. I noticed that most of the time (like 80-90%) I still had 1 cpu idling around or both cpu's idling about 48%. Granted, there were a few minutes (in qt compiling I think it was) that both cpu's were being used 100% but most of the time it was just 1.

Sooo. Unless this is a bug, it seems most build scripts don't seem to include the MAKEOPTS actively. Or am I totaly wrong here?

What are the experiences of other people with smp machines?
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What is this "signature" thing you are talking about?

rac

Emperor · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 10:25 am Post subject:

Yea I guess so

Hmm so some builds have parallel makes off? I guess developers dont realy care (low prio atleast) about making their packages compile faster.

Still a shame to see all that cpu power not getting used. I have seen several times now that 1 cpu is busy 2+ minutes to compile some file, while an other is doing nothing. That can't be right :lol:

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What is this "signature" thing you are talking about?

ronmon · Posted: Fri Aug 16, 2002 12:49 pm Post subject:

The very first reply in that thread explains why parallel builds are disabled for certain apps. Some need to be built in a certain order and running multiple jobs will cause 'make' (emake?) to jump ahead and break the build.