Does 'make' take advantage of multiple cores/threads? (linux)
We are considering a new workstation (will be running Fedora 25/26), and would like to know what a good CPU would be. To start off, I need to know how many cores I need. To help decide that, I want to see how one of the applications I will be using a lot preforms.
Does 'make' take advantage of multi-core/multi-thread? What about multi-CPU? Would making the Kernel, for example, be significantly shorter with multiple cores, or would the difference be not noticeable?
I'm not doing scientific calculations here, so a few milisecond difference won't bother me.
31 Answer
Yes:
GNU make knows how to execute several recipes at once. Normally, make will execute only one recipe at a time, waiting for it to finish before executing the next. However, the ‘-j’ or ‘--jobs’ option tells make to execute many recipes simultaneously. You can inhibit parallelism in a particular makefile with the .NOTPARALLEL pseudo-target (see Special Built-in Target Names).
The question you need to ask is not whether MAKE can take advantage of multiple threads, but whether you NEED it to take advantage of that. Are the application(s) you're making the sort that can be compiled in multiple discrete recipes by MAKE?
Though, to be honest, it is exceptionally difficult to find a non-multicore processor today, so why even the question? If you're going budget, your computer is likely going to have at least 4 logical processing units.
The rest of the question is not something we can answer here: What sort of loads will your applications place on a MAKE server?
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