Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S937783AbdCJOQY (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Mar 2017 09:16:24 -0500 Received: from wtarreau.pck.nerim.net ([62.212.114.60]:21013 "EHLO 1wt.eu" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S937658AbdCJOQV (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Mar 2017 09:16:21 -0500 Date: Fri, 10 Mar 2017 15:15:34 +0100 From: Willy Tarreau To: Pavel Machek Cc: Geert Uytterhoeven , Linus Torvalds , Josh Poimboeuf , Andy Lutomirski , kernel list , Ingo Molnar , Andrew Lutomirski , Borislav Petkov , Brian Gerst , Denys Vlasenko , Peter Anvin , Peter Zijlstra , Thomas Gleixner Subject: Re: Compiling kernels faster (was Re: v4.10: kernel stack frame pointer .. has bad value (null)) Message-ID: <20170310141534.GB32598@1wt.eu> Reply-To: linux-kernel.vger.kernel.org@1wt.eu References: <20170307182855.262ezbon2pm67qfd@treble> <20170308173703.2h57rsltma3smbcm@treble> <20170308212253.GA29562@amd> <20170309105655.GA29554@amd> <20170310131750.GB11875@amd> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20170310131750.GB11875@amd> User-Agent: Mutt/1.6.1 (2016-04-27) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 3821 Lines: 82 Hi Pavel, On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 02:17:51PM +0100, Pavel Machek wrote: > On Thu 2017-03-09 13:16:09, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote: > > Hi Pavel, > > > > On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 11:56 AM, Pavel Machek wrote: > > > On Thu 2017-03-09 10:38:46, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote: > > >> On Wed, Mar 8, 2017 at 10:22 PM, Pavel Machek wrote: > > >> > Well, I have fast CPUs, but most of the time they just compile > > >> > stuff. Especially bisect is compile-heavy. I suspect going back to > > >> > gcc-3.2 would bring me bigger advantages than CPU upgrade... > > >> > > >> I hope you do use ccache or distcc? > > > > > > I tried to use distcc before, but it was rather hard to maintain. No > > > ccache here. Hmm. I guess ccache really makes sense for bisect. > > > > Yes it does. So if you're not using it yet, do the below, today, not tomorrow. > > > > If your distro supports it, prepend /usr/lib/ccache/ to your $PATH. > > Create symlinks from the names of your favorite cross-compilers > > to /usr/bin/ccache, and make sure they are early in your $PATH. > > > > That's it! Enjoy! > > Hmm. Installed, and seems to work. OTOH, compilation now seems to > produce 2-3MB/sec writing on spinning rust, and CPUs are no longer > fully loaded. (make -j 7 on 2 core HT machine). Any io load sends the > CPU utilization to cca 50% range... Compilation goes up from 9:13 to > 11:40... to 23 minutes depending on situation. I guess it is still > worth it for the bisect, but it looks like ccache really needs an ssd. You need to put your cache in /dev/shm or some fast place not moving heavy metallic heads. That said, I have great success with distcc, I use it a lot with my build farms (home and work) on some fanless machines [1]. I had to apply some small updates recently to distcc because I noticed it would not delegate files built with certain -Wa arguments as were recently added to the kernel. I also found that by default it limits itself to 50 jobs which is often not enough to keep your local machine busy. The last 3.10.105-rc1 series I sent was build-tested this way, and it builds allmodconfig in slightly less than 5 mn (4900 modules I believe), with peaks up to 120 files per second. That's quite fast. With distcc however you need a fast local machine because cpp is run there, like a number of other tasks (eg: do not compress modules). You need some RAM as well because you'll need a high parallel job count to keep your machines busy (I build at -j60 which is the optimal value in my case). At work only 4 small fanless ARM boards (cortex A17) cut my build time by 3 (local is a t430s with an i5-3320m) and at home 6 such boards cut the build time by 2.5 (local is i7-6700K). You cannot reasonably do that with too slow build nodes because you want to limit the maximum build time for a single file. Here the cortex A17 at 1.8-2.0 GHz is perfect, it's the fastest fanless machine I found. Some cheap x86 machines can work well also. In all case you must absolutely use gigabit network or you'll constantly have some idle time as the traffic is very bursty. I'm seeing up to 650 Mbps without compressing with LZO, and between 70-150 Mbps with LZO, and it always builds faster with it. > On the other hand, switching to -O1 is really easy, and gets 15% or so > improvement. I used to do such things in the past but certain level of optimizations are useful to report warnings. For example I build haproxy daily at -O0, but sometimes I discover later that I introduced some warnings that are only detected at -O2. > Hmm. And killing chromium matters a lot for a compile time. I hate > modern web :-(. killall -STOP. That's what I'm doing with firefox when I want some resources. Cheers, Willy --- [1] https://forum.mqmaker.com/t/miqi-based-build-farm-finally-up-and-running/605/24