So I'm running the 2.2-rcs and have been seeing blogs about the new parallel merge capacities... Having a dual-dual-core Opteron and having run multiple merges manually for some time, this is VERY welcome news. =8^)
So after upgrading to -rc3 I set EMERGE_DEFAULT_OPTS to include "--jobs=10 --keep-going --load-average=15" and tried a few small merges (the rest of the world update). It worked nicely. So then, as I had adjusted LDFLAGS recently and hadn't yet done a full world remerge, I decided to try the BIG test, emerge --emptytree --world, with some 674 packages. For the first 100 or so packages, it worked quite well. However, about there, maybe package 120 or so, so about 20% of the way thru, it reverted to doing them one-at-a-time again. I'm now on package #279 and it's still doing them only one at a time, and this has included stuff like the xorg-docs (IIRC) package, that really shouldn't be pre-deps for stuff that has come since, so /something/ else should have been trying to merge, as long as load-average stays low, as it has much of the time (I have MAKEOPTS="-j -l20" so it's not going to be low all the time). Is this a known issue still being worked on, perhaps due to the limits of the package dependency and scheduling resolution such that it can't handle a full world remerge and defaults back to one-at-a-time after it reaches the extent of its mapping, or is this a new bug? Also, a little monitoring utility that could be run in another terminal and just list and update all the currently merging packages, and any that had failed to merge, so I could take a look at them while the system is still working on the rest, would be quite useful. I tried watch ls -d $PORTAGE_TMPDIR/*/* and it starts to work, but of course starts to error in a few seconds when the first package completes since the *s are resolved initially. With a bit of work I'm sure can get something simple working, but it'd be nice if there were a pre-made utility to do it. Maybe there is and I just don't know about it yet? =8^) Finally... I was rather confused the first time at just one job an install took a bit, as that's apparently not counted as "running", so it appeared nothing was going on for a bit. Maybe an "installing" count as well would be useful... and prevent that confusion. Thanks, guys. It's already fun playing with! =8^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
