On 2/2/06, Per Jessen
Michael Green wrote:
I cannot believe compiling the kernel requires ~700 processes running in parallel.
Compiling the kernel _requires_ just a single process, but if you build the kernel to stress a machine, one way is to build it with 'make -j'
I've just compiled 2.4.32 with 'make -j bzImage' on a dual PIII 500MHz machine with 1.5Gb RAM - the number of processes shown in 'top' crept slowly towards 700, the highest number I saw was 767.
Just started a 2.6 compilation with the -j switch causing make to
invoke more than 2700 processes and still increasing. It affects the
responsiveness of my system (Athlon XP 1600, 1GB) significantly.
I was talking about the defaults, initially. By default make is a
nice citizen. Giving the -j switch without options is a bad idea, at
least on multi-user systems :-)
\Steve
--
Steve Graegert