Hello, Some time ago, after buying a Core 2 Duo system, I've become interested in doing something about the inherent single-threadedness of the ports. Even though I have a dualcore machine, ports builds only ever use one core. I started thinking about various approaches to introduce parallelism to ports builds and wrote down my thoughts here: http://marc.info/?l=freebsd-ports&m=116124997126657&w=2
Well, since then I've tinkered with various approaches. I concentrated
on using make's -j feature. After adding the flag to the gmake
invocation in bsd.port.mk, I quickly noticed that some ports can take
advantage of the flag and thus build much more quickly (eg, all the KDE
ports), others are still single-threaded (X.org), but of course there
are also ports that fail to build (Openoffice.org). This means that a
per-port switch is required.
To make this change as as unintrusive as possible, and to not have to
patch a large number of files after every portsnap, I've decided to
build a whitelist of ports which work with (or despite? :) ) parallel
building. So here's what I use currently:
1) Put "USE_LOCAL_MK=yes" into /etc/make.conf
2) Use this as /usr/ports/Mk/bsd.local.mk:
http://www.maxlor.com/temp/bsd.local.mk .
(if you want just my changes in that file, you can run
"grep PARALLEL bsd.local.mk")
3) Save this to /usr/local/etc/parallel_builds.conf:
http://www.maxlor.com/temp/parallel_builds.conf .
This is a list of ports as stored in PKGORIGIN, or as
pkg_info -o reports them.
The code will run make with -jx, where x is the number of cores your
machine has, as reported by kern.smp.cpus.
So now I would like to invite you test, comment, or simply philosophize
on these changes.
Cheers
Benjamin
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