The Perils of Porting

Two days ago, I have checked in probably most requested feature of last few years. Ports framework now systematically supports building ports on multiple processing cores. It is achieved by passing -jX flag to make(1) running on vendor code. Of course not all ports handle this well, experimental run on pointyhat with this flag globally enabled turned up shy of 400 failures. Because of that, the feature was designed as a whitelist. Individual ports need to be enabled, and indeed, fellow developers took on and already started adding required declarations to popular ports like Firefox and others.

If you are FreeBSD ports user, you don’t need to do anything to enable the new feature. Whitelisted ports will automatically make use of all processors available in your computer. If you want, for some reasons, to disable this feature, put DISABLE_MAKE_JOBS=yes to your /etc/make.conf. By default, the level of parallelization will be equal to a number of processing cores in your machine. If you want to override this number, use for example MAKE_JOBS_NUMBER=6, again in /etc/make.conf. And if you are extra brave, or you want to check out all the yet unmarked ports, if they will build, you can define FORCE_MAKE_JOBS=yes in /etc/make.conf.

If you are FreeBSD port maintainer, nothing changes for you, if you don’t want. If you want to enable the use of multiple cores in your port, add MAKE_JOBS_SAFE=yes to a block somewhere below dependency declarations. If you know your port does not handle -jX well, and want to disable it from using -jX even when user forces this feature, use MAKE_JOBS_UNSAFE=yes. And that’s all to it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 1:30 pm and is filed under FreeBSD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.