[Pkg-dkms-maint] Bug#663114: Bug#663114: dkms should use parallel build on multiprocessor systems

Michal Suchanek michal.suchanek at ruk.cuni.cz
Mon Mar 12 12:50:34 UTC 2012


Excerpts from Michael Gilbert's message of Fri Mar 09 23:36:00 +0100 2012:
> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 10:53 AM, Michal Suchanek wrote:
> > Installing dkms packages takes quite some time.
> 
> Just curious, which packages take a lot of time? And how much is
> "quite some time"?  In my experience the modules I use build and
> install in less than 30 seconds.

On quite powerful desktop used for virtualization virtualbox modules
take about 45s to build.

The modules are rebuilt twice when both virtualbox and dkms are
upgraded.

Another package that takes long is openafs-modules-dkms. It takes about
2:30 to build and uses autoconf so the build time cannot be shortened
much I guess.

> 
> > It would be nice if dkms could use all cores on multicore systems to
> > build the kernel modules. I am sure that for some modules this would
> > speed up things quite a bit.
> 
> I agree that this would be a nice yet modest improvement.  I'm not
> sure if it's as simple as "make -j" in the appropriate scripts or not,
> but since you have some interest in this, perhaps you would be willing
> to look at what it would take to implement it.

Due to the way in which dkms handles modules there is not much room for
parallelism. Virtualbox has four modules but dkms insists on building
each separately.

Using -j6 in the openafs build command lowers the build time by about
40s.

Thanks

Michal





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