Multi-Threaded make

[David G. Miller]

JD <jd1008 <at> gmail.com> writes:

> For the last time:
> rpmbuild has no -j anything  option!!!
> 
JD -

Calm down.  Have a glass of wine or a beer or whatever.  Noone is saying
rpmbuild has a -j option.  Several of us are trying to explain to you that
programs like rpmbuild can do things that the end user may not realize are
happening.  If you wish to learn from our experience, we'll attempt to answer
your questions.  If not, don't expect much help.

Back to the question at hand.  Depending on the nature of the rpm being built,
rpmbuild may spawn several make processes that run in parallel.  You are seeing
this when you run ps during your build.  You probably have no control over this
although there MAY be options for invoking rpmbuild that control this.  

What I was attempting to explain is that tasks with significant I/O can
frequently run in parallel even though there are fewer CPUs than tasks.  Several
tasks can be waiting on I/O and the CPU is idle which means doing something else
MAY decrease the overall time the rpm build takes.  I used the example of
building the kernel to illustrate this; nothing more.

Cheers,
Dave