On 3/16/20 11:29 PM, Ken Moffat via blfs-dev wrote:
The more I edit, the more the phrase "with parallelism=4" grates.
First, I don't really think it is good English or good American.
In the days when everything was CMMI it could correctly be parsed as
"when using make -j4" (assuming people weren't silly enough to do
that on a machine with <4 cores). But nowadays, ninja on a 4-core
CPU will default to 6 jobs, although most packages can be forced to
used a specified number with the ninja patch from LFS (qtwebengine
is an exception, there I take cores offline on my laptop).
But the bigger problem is packages using rust - if you have 4 or
more cores online they schedule N+2 jobs. Actually, that in itself
is enough to deter me from getting a bigger machine with multiple
drives and trying to build systems in parallel, but not the problem
here.
I would prefer to change text like this to either
"on a 4-core machine" (anything using ninja or rust, including
librsvg and qtwebengine)
or
"using make -j4 on a machine with at least 4 cores" (anything using
make where ninja and rust are not involved).
And the second of those alternatives is longer than I'd like, but
I'm sure someone is going to complain that when they used make -j4
on an old 2-core machine the SBU was somewhat larger.
Alternatively, perhaps this is just the early onset of cabin fever,
and I'm not even in lockdown at the moment ;-)
When I look up the term parallelism, I get:
Computing
the use of parallel processing in computer systems.
"massive parallelism gives neural networks a high degree of fault tolerance"
I agree that the way we use it seems a little awkward, but it appears to
be somewhat accurate.
We do have a section in "Notes on Building Software" with the title
"Using Multiple Processors". Perhaps a discussion of the details there
would be appropriate. We have been using the parallelism= construct for
several years and I don't recall any complaints before this.
-- Bruce
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