Everyone:
I've just had to resurrect a machine which apparently failed
because the kernel was built with the make -j option.
As reported in the make(1) man page, the purpose of the -j option
is to let the make program build multiple portions of a program
concurrently on a machine with multiple CPUs. The idea is to make
use of SMP to speed up the build process. Unfortunately, after
updating a FreeBSD 9.0 system with freebsd-update (and seeing some
changes that would affect the custom kernel the machine was
running), I rebuilt the kernel using the -j5 option. (The machine
has 2 cores and 4 threads, but threads block due to I/O as well as
memory access. So, when it works properly, -j5 is the fastest option.)
The result was a kernel in which some compiled-in modules -- in
particular, netgraph nodes -- weren't accessible. mpd5 began
spewing odd messages, and VPN connections would not come up. I'd
built the kernel with the NO_MODULES option, so the modules that
were missing couldn't be loaded dynamically.
Rebuilding the kernel using a single-threaded "make" solved the problem.
Have others seen the same symptoms? I'd like to be able to do fast,
multithreaded kernel builds, but will obviously have to avoid it if
the resulting kernels are corrupted.
--Brett Glass
_______________________________________________
freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
