Paloş::Code.Blog()

Recently I upgraded my CPU to a Dual Core 2 Duo and am now running the x86_64 version of Arch Linux in which the makepkg tool can take advantage of the multiple core CPU and run make using multiple threads (great stuff). This is accomplished through the -jX option of the make utility (where X is the CPU count: 2 in my case). One can see the tremendous benefits of this when, for example, compiling the kernel (for me the compilation time dropped by almost 45%; I checked!).So, following that example I wanted to make my own makefiles use this trick, but automatically, so that the makefile itself would detect the number if CPU’s on the running system. Here’s what I got:

Command to get the CPU count on the running system as a simple number:

cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l

Then, to use it inside a makefile:

...
CPU_COUNT := $(shell cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep processor | wc -l)
...
make -j$(CPU_COUNT) ...
...

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