On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 12:45:18AM -0600, Bob Tanner wrote: > Anyone read anything about distributed compilation of the kernel? no, but the thought did occur to me the other day, as a possible excuse to buy a Rocketcalc box. (www.rocketcalc.com). ;) > I'm talking about distributing the compile of the kernel across idle boxes on > your network. it's possible that just building a beowulf cluster (which is what you're looking for) and substituting 'pmake' for 'make' will do the job for some problems. from what I hear, tho, the linux kernel has some ugly build dependencies that the current kbuild _usually_ gets right; but Owen <forgot his last name> gave a presentation at a linux conference in April last year (forgot which one) where he talks about problems that exist in the current make dependencies (this is not the same thing as ESR's CML2; which is just a tool to create the makefiles). so trying to distribute the build process across multiple machines may be a bit hairier than you might think. that said, it's probably a worthwhile thing to look into. I don't see that there is much difference between 'make -j 14' on one box; and having a make process that distributes those make processes across several machines which NFS-mount the repository. you might want to look at Mosix; and ask them if anyone has experimented with parallel make processes for the linux kernel. > Something ala pvm. NOT like a cluster. pvm is what beowulf clustering uses (tho it could be that I'm equivocating here). you're probably thinking of other types of clustering; for redundancy or network load-balancing, which most certainly aren't appropriate here. Carl Soderstrom. -- Network Engineer Real-Time Enterprises www.real-time.com