<rant>
There's no polite way to say it, but this is how msdos/windoze people
have been conditioned. We don't have the same built-in restrictions.
Its not so much the recursive make, as the ability to spawn concurrent
compilations that are independent [as stated in the makefile rules] of
one another. The modversions.h builder apparently circumvents 'makes'
built-in control mechanisms.
The use of 'make -j<n>' is -very- common in the *nix world, where one
compiler instance can utilize the CPU(s) while another is blocking for
disk I/O, even if you have just one CPU (remember, I'm looking at this
mostly from an SMP approach). There are other performance benefits as
well. Such concurrent compilations result in a significant reduction in
compile time for sizable projects such as our kernel.
Under 2.0.3x, 'make -j25' really hauled ass (just over a minute).
2.2.x seems to have restructured the makefiles so the kernel build
process leaves most of my CPU's idle, and seems to take forever. When
compiling, any time the 'percent-idle' is not 0, is wasted time.
thanks for listening...
</rant>
bye-
ron
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