Re: Dual Athlon MP 1900+ on MSI K7D Master-L

[Bill Davidsen]

On Thu, 18 Jul 2002, Kelledin wrote:
> Alan may have a different answer for you, but in my experience, 
> you can just specify the -j<whatever> flag when you run make 
> (and also set the MAKE variable to "make -j<whatever>".  The 
> speed benefit really kicks in when making bzImage or modules.
> 
> In general, I find it best to set the number of jobs to the 
> number of CPUs _plus 1_--i.e. for single CPU, use make -j2, and 
> for dual CPUs, use make -j3.  Going for that "plus 1" makes most 
> builds just a smidgen faster.  For me, on my dual PPro box, the 
> process would be something like:
> 
> make menuconfig
> make -j3 MAKE="make -j3" dep clean bzImage modules

These do different things...

If you put -j3 on the command line as an option to the primary make, it
can (will) run that many processes and do things out of order. If you use
MAKE='make -j3' it only takes effect after a new make process is started.
So you can put all the things on one command line and they will be run to
completion sequentially. I find this helpful to avoid mixing bzImage and
modules, one may get an error and the other will keep on going, scrolling
the error off the screen.

-- 
bill davidsen <[e-mail]>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.