[Buildroot] Speeding up builds

Thomas De Schampheleire patrickdepinguin at gmail.com
Tue Nov 5 17:48:10 UTC 2013


Hi Dallas,

Please don't top-post...

Dallas Clement <dallas.a.clement at gmail.com> wrote:
>Apart from makefile -j during C file compilation, it seems that building is
>very serialized.  A lot of time is spent in ./configure script execution,
>and quite a bit in installation of files.  All of this appears to be very
>serial in nature.  I realize there is not much that can be done about
>autoconf / automake to avoid this serialization.
>
>It would be great if buildroot could build multiple packages in parallel.
>That way, multiple cores could at least be performing activities like
>./configure which tend to be serial.   Has there ever been any discussion
>about this?

Yes, definitely. There is at least one unsolved problem though. Some packages have optional dependencies: if the dependency is present when the package is built, it is used, otherwise it isn't (but compilation happily proceeds). This means that the package order is relevant in this case, and the end result will differ if the order is swapped due to parallel building. Expressing all these potential dependencies is unrealistic.

Have a look in the recent buildroot mailing list archives for the patches from Fabio Porcedda and the discussion around it. He has been working on this topic.

Best regards,
Thomas




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