Xorg taking too long to build on imac G5

[Justin Hibbits]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 18:20:53 +0000
terry <terry at thehjs.co.uk> wrote:

> I have installed FreeBSD onto an imac G5 20” (using 
> FreeBSD-12.0-RELEASE-powerpc-powerpc64-disc1.iso) and have started 
> building xorg from source.
> 
> I used “make install” with ‘BATCH=yes’ to install the standard
> options and avoid halts in the build process.
> 
> However, the build process has been running now for 106 hours and is 
> still running! My questions are:
> 
> 1) Has the build process somehow got into a loop (is it possible to
> test for this?) and should I terminate the build?
> 
> 2) If yes, what precautions can I take to avoid a repetition?
> 
> I have spent some time looked through the forum and mailing lists but 
> have been unable to find answers so any suggestions or pointers to 
> existing solutions would be welcomed.
> 

Hi Terry,

Yes, on such an old machine it can take a *very* long time to build
x11/xorg and all its dependencies, there's a long list of them
including lang/gcc5, lang/gcc8 and devel/llvm60, each of which can take
over 10 hours.  If I remember correctly the iMac G5 was a single-core
single-CPU machine, so it can take even longer, significantly longer.
On my dual-core 2.3GHz it would take ~13 hours to build llvm, with 2
threads running.  So I imagine at least 20 hours with a single thread
running.

Personally, I strongly recommend installing poudriere, and building
with that, as it simplifies monitoring, and allows for a cleaner build
environment.  It doesn't save you any time at all on your build, though.

- Justin