Faster TOOL-CHAIN build.

Martin Hodge · 2011-11-11 13:00

If you have a multi-core processor in your machine you can significantly reduce the build time of PropGCC by adding the '-j' option to some of the make commands in rebuild.sh.

For example, build times on my quad-core Core i5-2:

With no '-j' option: 10m 46s
With '-j 4': 3m 55s

(I haven't seen any side effects of this option, however it should be vetted by an expert.)

rebuild.zip

-edit-
This works for Linux, not sure about Cygwin.

Ken Gracey · 2011-11-11 13:54

Martin, glad that you are on board with PropGCC. I think it has very good implications for the Propeller ASC.

Ken Gracey

Martin Hodge · 2011-11-11 14:19

I'm not board with it, I think it's very exciting.

But seriously thanks for the mention. I'm very interested in getting as many hooks as I can into that Italian Juggernaut.

jazzed · 2011-11-11 14:59

Last time I used -j was about 5 years ago. It seems to make a difference even on VirtualBox.
Thanks for the reminder.

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) · 2011-11-11 15:02

For the uninformed (i.e. me), why does this matter? IOW, what is a typical build time for a Prop GCC program?

-Phil

jazzed · 2011-11-11 15:14

Phil,

Building a C program with propeller-elf-gcc is very quick.
Building the entire Propeller GCC tool-chain takes a while depending on the system.

Thanks,
--Steve

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) wrote: »

For the uninformed (i.e. me), why does this matter? IOW, what is a typical build time for a Prop GCC program?

-Phil

mindrobots · 2011-11-11 15:19

@Phil, when it comes to building the toolchain, I sit on the sidelines and cheer on the A-team. I like having someone point me to a built package ready for me to install. We're tool users, not tool makers!

@A-team: Go team, go!! Build those packages!!!!

Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi) · 2011-11-11 15:23

jazzed wrote:

Building a C program with propeller-elf-gcc is very quick. Building the entire Propeller GCC tool-chain takes a while depending on the system.

Ah, got it. Thanks!

-Phil

jazzed · 2011-11-13 14:03

Martin Hodge wrote: »

If you have a multi-core processor in your machine you can significantly reduce the build time of PropGCC by adding the '-j' option to some of the make commands in rebuild.sh.
...

Martin, I've added "jbuild.sh" to the repository.

Usage: ./jbuild.sh N [rm]
N is the number of jobs.
Optional rm says remove the build directory first.

This works fine on Debian Linux. YMMV on other platforms.

I made the number of jobs a parameter because some machines have 6+ cores in addition to the extra multimedia co-processors.

Martin Hodge · 2011-11-13 22:05

Hey, cool. Just noticed the new build script on the latest pull. Tested and works on Fedora 16.

You can also get fancy and do JOBS="-j "`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l`
That should work for one or more cores automatically.

jazzed · 2011-11-14 14:23

Martin Hodge wrote: »

Hey, cool. Just noticed the new build script on the latest pull. Tested and works on Fedora 16.

You can also get fancy and do JOBS="-j "`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l`
That should work for one or more cores automatically.

Nice tip Martin. Been a while since I looked at /proc.

We can use: ./jbuild.sh `cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l`.

I use Debian on VirtualBox. It doesn't have processor in cpuinfo.
VirtualBox Debian still gets a big speedup if I use ./jbuild.sh 4

Faster TOOL-CHAIN build.

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