speed up port compiling using RAM (tmpfs) ???

[Gayn Winters]

> [mailto:owner-freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Kris Kennaway
> Sent: Friday, January 20, 2006 11:47 AM
> To: Gary Thorpe
> Cc: Wesley Shields; Ashok Shrestha; Brandon Flowers; Kris 
> Kennaway; Mike Meyer; freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org; Dag-Erling Sm?rgrav
> Subject: Re: speed up port compiling using RAM (tmpfs) ???
> 
> 
> On Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 11:49:29AM -0500, Gary Thorpe wrote:
> 
> > >-j is not safe to use with port builds since many ported software
> > >contain race conditions in the build.
> > >
> > >Kris
> > 
> > This effectively means that you cannot take advantage of SMP to
compile 
> > FreeBSD's ports collection. That sounds like a big 
> > limitation...especially for people trying to speed up bulk builds.
> 
> Yeah, but what do you propose to do about it?  We have 14000 ports
> that need to be inspected for build race conditions and fixed before
> you can turn on -j by default.
> 
> Kris


With a dual processor (even dual core?) is there a way to assign the big
make to one processor and to assign the foreground activity (email,
edits, etc) to another?  Is SMP somehow smart enough to do this
automagically?

-gayn