GNU Make options. Printing targets and prerequisites - linux

Hello I was wondering if there is a feature in the linux GNU Make that allows me to print the targets and prerequisites that need to be run without actually running them! I'm tracing a massive make environment and hoping to get an idea of the flow! Any other tips would be much appreciated!
ex
$ make -option mytarget
making prereq to mytarget
making prereq to prereq
making prereq to prereq to prereq
making mytarget
done..... etc.

make -n does a "dry run", printing the commands make would run without actually running them.
make -d prints out a huge amount of debugging information about how make is going about its business and deciding what targets to build and in what order.
You can combine the two too. You might also like to know about make -r, which will quiet down the make -d output by not checking any implicit rules, and make -k which will make things keep going in the case of an error (which sometimes happens when doing make -n, depending on how your makefile is set up):
Relevant parts from the make(1) man page:
-d
Print debugging information in addition to normal processing. The
debugging information says which files are being considered for
remaking, which file-times are being compared and with what
results, which files actually need to be remade, which implicit
rules are considered and which are applied -- everything interesting about how make decides what to do.
-k, --keep-going
Continue as much as possible after an error. While the target that failed, and those that depend on it, cannot be remade, the other dependencies of these targets can be processed all the same.
-n, --just-print, --dry-run, --recon
Print the commands that would be executed, but do not execute
them.
-r, --no-builtin-rules
Eliminate use of the built-in implicit rules. Also clear out the
default list of suffixes for suffix rules.

Related

How do I disable SPEC CPU checksum?

I am building on one machine and running it on the other.
Build:
runcpu --action build --config xxx
Run:
runcpu --action run --config xxx --nobuild
All cases reported checksum mismatched. How do I resolve this.
Explanation
For SPEC CPU 2017, check out the config file options for runcpu. It lists two options that may be of interest that you can put in a header section: strict_rundir_verify and verify_binaries. I pasted their descriptions below.
strict_rundir_verify=[yes|no]:
When set, the tools will verify that the file contents in existing run directories match the expected checksums. Normally, this should always be on, and reportable runs will force it to be on. Turning it off might make the setup phase go a little faster while you are tuning the benchmarks.
Developer notes: setting strict_rundir_verify=no might be useful when prototyping a change to a workload or testing the effect of differing workloads. Note, though, that once you start changing your installed tree for such purposes it is easy to get lost; you might as well keep a pristine tree without modifications, and use a second tree that you convert_to_development.
verify_binaries=[yes|no]:
runcpu uses checksums to verify that executables match the config file that invokes them, and if they do not, runcpu forces a recompile. You can turn that feature off by setting verify_binaries=no.
Warning: It is strongly recommended that you keep this option at its default, yes (that is, enabled). If you disable this feature, you effectively say that you are willing to run a benchmark even if you don't know what you did or how you did it -- that is, you lack information as to how it was built!
The feature can be turned off because it may be useful to do so sometimes when debugging (for an example, see env_vars), but it should not be routinely disabled.
Since SPEC requires that you disclose how you build benchmarks, reportable runs (using the command-line switch --reportable or config file setting reportable=yes) will cause verify_binaries to be automatically enabled. For CPU 2017, this field replaces the field check_md5.
For SPEC CPU 2006, these two options also exist, but note that verify_binaries used to be called check_md5.
Example
Example. I recently built the SPEC CPU 2017 binaries, patched them (in their respective exe directories), and then performed a (non-reportable) run. To do this, I put the following in the "global options" header section of my configuration file:
#--------- Global Settings ----------------------------------------------------
...
reportable = 0
verify_binaries = 0
...
before building, patching, and running (with the --nobuild flag) the suite.

Why are some Bash commands both built-in and external?

Some commands are internal built-in Bash commands while others are external (other programs). I see why certain commands need to be built-in. Some of the reasons are:
If a command needs to change the internal state of the shell process.
If a command performs a very basic operation in the shell.
If a command is called often and needs to be made fast. An external command is executed by loading an external program and hence is slower.
But why are some commands both built-in and external, for example echo and test? I understand echo is used a lot and thus is built-in (Reason 3). But then why also have it as an external command and have a binary for it in /bin/echo? The built-in version of echo will always take precedence over the external version and thus, the external version is hardly ever used. So, why then have an external version of it at all?
It's exactly your point 3. When a command does very little (echo is a good example), spawning a new process dominates the run time behavior. With growing disks and bandwidth and code bases you always reach a spot when you have so much data and so many files (our code base at work has 100k files!!) that one less spawn per file makes a difference of minutes.
That's also why the typical built-in is a drop-in replacement which takes (perhaps a superset of) the same arguments as the binary.
You also ask why the old binary is still retained even though Bash has it as a built-in — the answer is that a lot of programs rely on the existence of that /bin/echo. It's actually standardized.
Bash is only one of many user interfaces and offline command interpreters. They all have different sets of built-ins. Some shells are purposefully small and rely a lot on what you could call "legacy" binaries. One example is ash and its successor, Dash. Dash is now the default /bin/sh in Ubuntu and Debian due to its speed, and is popular for embedded systems due to its small size. (But even Dash has builtins for echo, test and dozens of other commands, and provides a command history for interactive use.)

Changing the configuration of an already-built kernel and recompiling only what's been changed

The scenario outlined is this:
Someone has built the Linux kernel from source code.
That person wants to change the build configuration.
They still have all of the object files and temporary files that were produced by the previous build operation.
Given all of that, what needs to be done to rebuild as few things as possible in order to save time?
I understand that these will trigger or necessitate a complete recompilation of the source code:
Running make clean.
Running make menuconfig.
make clean is an obvious course of action to avoid to achieve the desired goal because it deletes all object files, both those that would need to be rebuilt and those that could otherwise be left alone. I don't know why make menuconfig would cause the build system to recompile everything, but I've read on here that that is what it would do.
The problem I see with not having the second avenue open to me is that if I change the configuration manually with a text editor, the options that I change might require changes in other options that depend on them (e.g., IMA_TRUSTED_KEYRING depends on SYSTEM_TRUSTED_KEYRING) and I'd be working without an interface that would automatically make those required secondary changes.
It occurred to me that invoking scripts/kconfig/mconf, the program built and launched by make menuconfig, could possibly be a solution to the problems described in the previous paragraph since it was not stated that mconf is what makes the build system recompile everything. But, it possibly could be that very program, so I do not wish to try it until I know it won't do that.
Sooooo, how does one achieve the stated objective given the stated scenario?

How to get an ETA?

I am build several large set of source files (targets) using scons. Now, I would like to know if there is a metric I can use to show me:
How many targets remain to be build.
How long it will take -- this to be honest, this is probably a no-go as it is really hard to tell!
How can I do that in scons?
There is currently no progress indicator built into SCons, and it's also not trivial to provide one. The problem is, that SCons doesn't build the complete DAG first, and then starts the build...such that you'd have a total number of targets to visit that you could use as a reference (=100%).
Instead, it makes up the DAG on the go... It looks at each target, and then expands the list of its children (sources and implicit dependencies like headers) to check whether they are up-to-date. If a child has changed, it gets rebuilt by applying the same "build step" recursively.
In this way, SCons crawls itself from the list of targets, as given on the command-line (with the "." dir being the default), down the DAG...where only the parts are ever visited, that are required for (or, in other words: have a dependency to) the requested targets.
This makes it possible for SCons to handle things like "header files, generated by a program that must be compiled first" in the first go...but it also means that the total number of targets/children to get visited changes constantly.
So, a standard progress indicator would continuously climb towards the 80%-90%, just to then fall back to 50%...and I don't think this would give you the information you're really after.
Tip: If your builds are large and you don't want to wait, do incremental builds and only build the library/program you're currently doing work on ("scons lib1"). This will still take into account all dependencies, but only a fraction of the DAG has to get expanded. So, you use less memory and get faster update times...especially if you use the "interactive" mode. In a project with a 100000 C files total, the update of a single library with 500 C files takes about 1s on my machine. For more infos on this topic check out http://scons.org/wiki/WhySconsIsNotSlow .

How to reduce compilation cost in GCC and make?

I am trying to build some big libraries, like Boost and OpenCV, from their source code via make and GCC under Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop. Unfortunately the compilation of those big libraries seem to be big burden to my laptop (Acer Aspire 5000). Its fan makes higher and higher noises until out of a sudden my laptop shuts itself down without the OS gracefully turning off.
So I wonder how to reduce the compilation cost in case of make and GCC?
I wouldn't mind if the compilation will take much longer time or more space, as long as it can finish without my laptop shutting itself down.
Is building the debug version of libraries always less costly than building release version because there is no optimization?
Generally speaking, is it possible to just specify some part of a library to install instead of the full library? Can the rest be built and added into if later found needed?
Is it correct that if I restart my laptop, I can resume compilation from around where it was when my laptop shut itself down? For example, I noticed that it is true for OpenCV by looking at the progress percentage shown during its compilation does not restart from 0%. But I am not sure about Boost, since there is no obvious information for me to tell and the compilation seems to take much longer.
UPDATE:
Thanks, brianegge and Levy Chen! How to use the wrapper script for GCC and/or g++? Is it like defining some alias to GCC or g++? How to call a script to check sensors and wait until the CPU temperature drops before continuing?
I'd suggest creating a wrapper script for gcc and/or g++
#!/bin/bash
sleep 10
exec gcc "$#"
Save the above as "gccslow" or something, and then:
export CC="gccslow"
Alternatively, you can call the script gcc and put it at the front of your path. If you do that, be sure to include the full path in the script, otherwise, the script will call itself recursively.
A better implementation could call a script to check sensors and wait until the CPU temperature drops before continuing.
For your latter question: A well written Makefile will define dependencies as a directed a-cyclical graph (DAG), and it will try to satisfy those dependencies by compiling them in the order according to the DAG. Thus as a file is compiled, the dependency is satisfied and need not be compiled again.
It can, however, be tricky to write good Makefiles, and thus sometime the author will resort to a brute force approach, and recompile everything from scratch.
For your question, for such well known libraries, I will assume the Makefile is written properly, and that the build should resume from the last operation (with the caveat that it needs to rescan the DAG, and recalculate the compilation order, that should be relatively cheap).
Instead of compiling the whole thing, you can compile each target separately. You have to examine the Makefile for identifying them.
Tongue-in-cheek: What about putting the laptop into the fridge while compiling?

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