Re: SMP configuration

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello,

* NightStrike wrote on Mon, May 17, 2010 at 06:49:21PM CEST:
> On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 12:40 PM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> > On 05/17/2010 08:09 AM, Michael Menegakis wrote:
> >> On windows, probably because I had heard windows are very slow in
> >> creating new processes unlike UNIX, configuration is mindbogglingly
> >> slow.
> >>
> >> I wonder if there's a way to run it SMP ..-ish..
> >
> > How is SMP going to change the number of processes to be run?
> 
> It wouldn't, but it would allow you to fork the next process while the
> first is running.

Well, I assume this hints toward parallel execution of configure tests.
This is fairly tricky, for several reasons: the bulk of the current
tests may assume to depend upon arbitrary state generated by tests run
before them (the only real exception to this being the AC_*_ONCE macros)
so parallelization will mostly not be possible in an automatic way, and
secondly, parallel job handling in the shell is, umm, very prone to
shell bugs.  We've done the latter for Autotest, but it really only
works well with bash, but no other shells, mostly due to bugs in the
shells.  It might still be worth a try though.

Cheers,
Ralf