On Thursday 22 March 2007 22:08, Darrin Chandler wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 12:40:48AM -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > Sounds similar to debian which also has to reboot a new kernel. Do
> > you run the rebuild niced?
>
> I don't. I want it to be done as soon as possible.
If you want your build done as soon as possible, then you would use
nice(1) as root to have the build process run at a higher priority and
hence receive more processing time.
# nice -n -20 make build
Is building at maximum priority, or even higher priority, a smart thing
to do? -I don't know. But I can say the examples in the release(8) man
page suggest *lowering* the priority and hence receive less processing
time -- the default operation of nice(1) is to lower priority.
# nice make build
which is equivalent to
# nice -n 10 make build
The range of numbers used with nice(1), from 20 to -20, are somewhat
counter intuitive since (positive) 20 is the lowest priority and
(negative) -20 is the highest priority.
If you're using csh(1), the syntax for nice(1) is different because it's
built into the shell -- see the BUGS section of the nice(1) man page.
But of course, building the system with anything other than the default
shell, ksh(1), is unsupported.
As for the wisdom and/or reasoning of lowering the priority of the build
as suggested in release(8), I would guess it has something to do with
the pain the developers endure when building releases on very slow
archs where the source tree is mounted read only via nfs over very slow
network connections (i.e vax). -It's just a guess and may be wrong.
Kind Regards,
JCR
