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Re: 604e's suck (was Yaboot Config Question)



On Sat, Apr 07, 2001 at 03:17:24PM -0700, Taro Fukunaga wrote:
> I don't have the technical background to follow a lot of this thread,
> but I've been studying pthreads, and it seems that whether a certain
> process gets executed more quickly on a multiprocessor computer depends
> on how well the process uses threads for concurrency. So in a
> compilation scenario, a make that can issue several compilation steps at
> once would be ideal. Does make (or I guess the compiler) take advantage
> of multiple threads, or is there some other strategy being used?

 Read the man page for make.  make -j 4 will run 4 jobs at once.  gcc is not
itself multi-threaded, so make just runs multiple copies of the compiler.
(multiple heavyweight procs are just as good as multiple lightweight procs.)

 You're right, compiling separate files is totally parallelizable, so you're
only limited by resources the CPUs have to share, like memory (and L2 on
shared-L2 machines) bandwidth, and of course disk (disk isn't much of a
limitation unless your CPUs are way faster than mine :).

> I hope this isn't a stupid question :-)

 You're coming pretty close, but I'll let it go this time ;-)

-- 
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ;  e-mail: X(peter@llama.nslug. , ns.ca)

"The gods confound the man who first found out how to distinguish the hours!
 Confound him, too, who in this place set up a sundial, to cut and hack
 my day so wretchedly into small pieces!" -- Plautus, 200 BCE



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