F<configsmoke.pl> offers you the {makeopt} variable for the "make" and "make test-prep" steps. It also offers the {testmake} variable, which defaults to $Config{make}, but you could try to set that to "make -j" (but I haven't tested that).
This deliberate split between makeoptions for different steps in the process was done because Alan ran into problems running the equivalent of "make -j _test", but remember parallel "make test" it not guaranteed to work!
Why is that? My latest servers are Xeons with the so-called HTT stuff. I noticed that smoking 5.8 or 5.9 took 23 minutes per configuration on a standard kernel on FreeBSD. When I recompiled the kernel with HTT support, that time went down to 17 minutes.
But now my system load maxes out at about 0.48. If parallel make tests were guaranteed to work, the process would be able to soak up more cycles going to waste. Are there archives on the subject (of prblems with //l makes), either here or on p5p?
There are race conditions between some of the tests in the perl test suite, i.e. one test initialises files used by 'later' tests - except that with parallel make 'later' may not actually be later. I forget which exact ones were the problem, but feel free to fix! ;-)
-- Alan Burlison --
