Re: multiple cpu's

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Jim,

* Jim Meyering wrote on Sun, Aug 12, 2007 at 12:46:20PM CEST:
> 
> On a related note, it'd sure be nice if "make -j4 check" would run its
> tests in parallel.  Especially on an SMP system, and/or when some
> tests sleep for a few (interminable :-) seconds.
> 
> Of course, this might not be trivial, especially trying to keep
> the resulting Makefile.in portable.  However, even if it means
> I'd need to use a special option to generate a GNU-make-only
> Makefile.in, I'd happily use the result for day to day work.

IIRC, Akim Demaille posted a patch a while ago on an automake list for
this, GNU make-specific.  I don't recall how much work was left to do,
but on my list it's a bit on the far end.

> Currently, the check-TESTS rule is just a big for-loop.
> Recording pass, fail, xfail, and skip subtotals in parallel might
> be a challenge, but I'd be happy to sacrifice those along
> with portability, in return for parallelized tests.

When in doubt, let 'make' do the parallelism for you; e.g., each
status output of a test to be run is a target (file), do all those,
collect (read) the results serially afterwards.  I think Paul suggested
something similar already, but that could also have been for Autotest.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Ralf