I'm having a weird parallel build problem. My makefile looks something like this (not the actual Makefile, just to illustrate the point, so don't hate):
parser.c parser.h : parser.y
lexer.c : lexer.l parser.h
app : lexer.o parser.o
Because both the parser.c and parser.h file both depend on parser.y, bison eventually gets invoked twice, once on behalf of lexer.c (which includes parser.h and therefore depends on it), and once on behalf of app (which depends on parser.o, which depends on parser.c).
When I make with -d to see the debugging output, I see that bison get invoked twice in two different threads, relatively close together. I'm worried that when all the stars are aligned just right, I could have a race condition and corrupt bison output. I tried a few things with the dependencies in an attempt to force them to be serial, but I just starting getting stranger and stranger make behaviour.
So, the million dollar question is this: Is there a more sane way around the fact that when a program like bison actually outputs two files, satisfying two dependencies, and therefore when built with -j might be invoked from two different unsynced threads?
Thanks.
You should use a pattern rule; in pattern rules multiple targets mean that one invocation of the recipe generates both targets:
%.c %.h : %.y
...
Related
I mean is faster to write (bash script) for example:
gfortran -Wall -Wextra -o program.out \
rffti.f rffti1.f rfftf.f rfftf1.f radf4.f radf2.f radf3.f radf5.f radfg.f test.f90
, than a makefile to do the same.
You don't need a Makefile if you don't want to use one. It is customary for languages where you split input into more than one file because make takes care of keeping track of what needs to be recompiled; if you share your project with others, letting them say make and not care what's in the Makefile is also simple user friendliness, even if it's not strictly required. And anyway, putting that command in a Makefile is only very marginally more complex and verbose than putting it in a shell script, but leaves much more room for future growth.
Just out of curiosity, what is the order of executing targets in a makefile with
${OBJ_DIR}/%.o: ${SRC_DIR}/%.cpp
I noticed it is not lexicographic (like ls -l).
Is it just random?
They are built in the order in which make walks the prerequisite graph.
In the simple case where you don't have parallel jobs (no -j option), then if you have a target like:
prog: foo.o bar.o. baz.o
make will first try to build foo.o, then bar.o, then baz.o, then finally prog.
If you do enable parallel jobs, then make will still try to start builds in the same order but because some builds finish faster than others, you may get different targets building at the same time.
I have these recipes in my Makefile. They generate cross-compiled objects for ARM architecture and link them into an elf binary:
%.ao: %.c
$(ARM_CC) $(ARM_CPPFLAGS) $(ARM_FLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -c -o $# $<
%.elf: %.ao startup_stm32f0xx.ao system_stm32f0xx.ao
$(ARM_CC) $(ARM_FLAGS) $other_arguments -o $# $^
This works fine from a clean build.
Contrary to my expectation, if I then say touch foo.c; make foo.elf, gmake responds with
make: 'foo.elf' is up to date.
If I try to make foo.ao, gmake says that it, too , is up to date.
What am I missing?
Edit after reading the comments:
TLDR: I did have multiple rules matching the same target, as John Bollinger alluded and HardcoreHenry said specifically.
In addition to the rules above, there's a rule for assembly sources so I can use those vendor files:
%.ao: %.s
$(ARM_CC) $(ARM_CPPFLAGS) $(ARM_FLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -c -o $# $<
I had been debugging some macros, and used -save-temps to look at preprocessor output. This option also writes .s files. So after I'd run make foo.elf, I'd have the following in my directory:
foo.c
foo.i
foo.s
foo.ao
foo.elf
I can touch foo.c, but make sees that there's a foo.s which is older than foo.ao, and produces the output that it does. On a clean build, there is no foo.s, so make finds the %.c:%.ao rule and the build proceeds from foo.c.
(BTW, .ao stands for ARM object. In addition to cross-compiling for AMR, I compile many of the sources to run unit tests on the host, using the built-in .o:.c rule)
I'm not a fan of pattern rules.
Make can make very strange decisions on which rules apply depending on whatever is lying around on your hard disks.
It's all a bit arbitrary.
Much better IMHO to tell make exactly what files you need for a target.
It's pretty easy too.
Just prefix your pattern rule with the list of targets you actually want it to apply to.
This makes it a Static Pattern Rule.
objects := main.ao tools.ao devices.ao# etc
${objects}: %.ao: %.c
$(ARM_CC) $(ARM_CPPFLAGS) $(ARM_FLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -c -o $# $<
%.elf: ${objects} startup_stm32f0xx.ao system_stm32f0xx.ao
$(ARM_CC) $(ARM_FLAGS) $other_arguments -o $# $^
As an added bonus, make now won't try to create the pre-existing startup_stm32f0xx.ao and system_stm32f0xx.ao.
Usually I find it nicer to list the source files, but YMMV:
sources := main.c tools.c devices.c
objects := $(patsubst $.c,%.ao,${sources})
(P.S. Using a Static Pattern Rule doesn't really give you any advantage over a normal rule in this noddy case. I just wanted to show a small tweak that would make your makefiles much more consistent in their behaviour.)
I know it's bad form to use an answer to respond to another answer, but I ran out of space in a comment to #bobbogo's answer.
Sorry but I can't agree with your assessment of pattern rules. It's not true that you will get "strange decisions" based on "whatever is lying around on your harddisks", and it's certainly not arbitrary.
There is one advantage of static pattern rules over pattern rules, and that is also its downside: a static pattern rule is a shorthand for creating an explicit rule, so that rule will always be used to build that target. A pattern rule, on the other hand, is just one possible way to build a target: if the prerequisites of a pattern rule don't exist and can't be made, then make keeps going and looks for other pattern rules that might be able to build that target.
So if you have multiple possible ways you can build a target then an explicit rule cannot be used for that.
The problem with pattern rules is that if NO pattern rule applies then make just assumes there is no rule to build that target. If the target exists then make simply says "up to date" (as we see in the question) since there's no rule to build it. That can be confusing to users.
If you use an explicit rule (including a static pattern rule) and some prerequisite doesn't exist and can't be created, then make will exit with an error, which can make it easier to figure out what went wrong.
Im trying to run this simple makefile commands but get the error - 'Nothing to be done for 'all''
FILES = file1.c file2.c file3.c
all:test
test:
for file in $(FILES);
do
echo $$file;
done
The target test has no dependencies and therefore no reason to be built, which is inherited by the target all. It has instructions, but it should include FILES as its prerequisites. What you're doing appears to be ingredients-first, but test is the target. Working backwards is what make is best at. You may benefit from an article called "Auto-Dependency Generation" which takes the opposite approach (you appear to think like I do.)
test: $(FILES)
Then you could do something like the following:
$(FILES:.o:.c): %.o: %.c
$(CC) -c -o $# $<
The first part is a set of possible targets, the list of objects corresponding to the list of sources, and the second is a specific but nameless object (it will assume the name of the corresponding source.) Later on, the target, e.g. test, can be the name of your executable taking these objects as both dependencies and objects to link statically. For my purposes I typically use shared libraries but this is irrelevant to the question at hand.
Edit: untested, will revise if issues ensue
Is there a way how to ask gmake to never run two targets from a set in parallel?
I don't want to use .NOTPARALLEL, because it forces the whole Makefile to be run sequentially, not just the required part.
I could also add dependencies so that one depends on another, but then (apart from being ugly) I'd need to build all of them in order to build the last one, which isn't necessary.
The reason why I need this is that (only a) part of my Makefile invokes ghc --make, which takes care of its dependencies itself. And it's not possible to run it in parallel on two different targets, because if the two targets share some dependency, they can rewrite each other's .o file. (But ghc is fine with being called sequentially.)
Update: To give a specific example. Let's say I need to compile two programs in my Makefile:
prog1 depends on prog1.hs and mylib.hs;
prog2 depends on prog2.hs and mylib.hs.
Now if I invoke ghc --make prog1.hs, it checks its dependencies, compiles both prog1.hs and mylib.hs into their respective object and interface files, and links prog1. The same happens when I call ghc --make prog2.hs. So if they the two commands get to run in parallel, one will overwrite mylib.o of the other one, causing it to fail badly.
However, I need that neither prog1 depends on prog2 nor vice versa, because they should be compilable separately. (In reality they're very large with a lot of modules and requiring to compile them all slows development considerably.)
Hmmm, could do with a bit more information, so this is just a stab in the dark.
Make doesn't really support this, but you can sequential-ise two targets in a couple of ways. First off, a real use for recursive make:
targ1: ; recipe1...
targ2: ; recipe2...
both-targets:
${MAKE} targ1
${MAKE} targ2
So here you can just make -j both-targets and all is fine. Fragile though, because make -j targ1 targ2 still runs in parallel. You can use dependencies instead:
targ1: ; recipe1...
targ2: | targ1 ; recipe2...
Now make -j targ1 targ2 does what you want. Disadvantage? make targ2 will always try to build targ1 first (sequentially). This may (or may not) be a show-stopper for you.
EDIT
Another unsatisfactory strategy is to explicitly look at $MAKECMDGOALS, which lists the targets you specified on the command-line. Still a fragile solution as it is broken when someone uses dependencies inside the Makefile to get things built (a not unreasonable action).
Let's say your makefile contains two independent targets targ1 and targ2. Basically they remain independent until someone specifies on the command-line that they must both be built. In this particular case you break this independence. Consider this snippet:
$(and $(filter targ1,${MAKECMDGOALS)),$(filter targ2,${MAKECMDGOALS}),$(eval targ1: | targ2))
Urk! What's going on here?
Make evaluates the $(and)
It first has to expand $(filter targ1,${MAKECMDGOALS})
Iff targ1 was specified, it goes on to expand $(filter targ2,${MAKECMDGOALS})
Iff targ2 was also specified, it goes on to expand the $(eval), forcing the serialization of targ1 and targ2.
Note that the $(eval) expands to nothing (all its work was done as a side-effect), so that the original $(and) always expands to nothing at all, causing no syntax error.
Ugh!
[Now that I've typed that out, the considerably simpler prog2: | $(filter prog1,${MAKECMDGOALS})
occurs to me. Oh well.]
YMMV and all that.
I'm not familiar with ghc, but the correct solution would be to get the two runs of ghc to use different build folders, then they can happily run in parallel.
Since I got stuck at the same problem, here is another pointer in the direction that make does not provide the functionality you describe:
From the GNU Make Manual:
It is important to be careful when using parallel execution (the -j switch; see Parallel Execution) and archives. If multiple ar commands run at the same time on the same archive file, they will not know about each other and can corrupt the file.
Possibly a future version of make will provide a mechanism to circumvent this problem by serializing all recipes that operate on the same archive file. But for the time being, you must either write your makefiles to avoid this problem in some other way, or not use -j.
What you are attempting, and what I was attempting (using make to insert data in a SQLite3 database) suffers from the exact same problem.
I needed to separate the compilation from other steps (cleaning, building dirs and linking), as I wanted to run the compilation with more core processes and the -j flag.
I managed to solve this, with different makefiles including and calling each other. Only the "compile" make file is running in parallel with all the cores, the rest of the process is syncronous.
I divided my makefile in 3 separate scripts:
settings.mk: contains all the variables and flag definitions
makefile: has all the targets except the compilation one (It has .NOTPARALLEL directive). It calls compile.mk with -j flag
compile.mk: contains only the compile operation (without .NOTPARALLEL)
In settings.mk I have:
CC = g++
DB = gdb
RM = rm
MD = mkdir
CP = cp
MAKE = mingw32-make
BUILD = Debug
DEBUG = true
[... all other variables and flags needed, directories etc ...]
In makefile I have Link and compilation target as these:
include .makefiles/settings.mk
[... OTHER TARGETS (clean, directories etc)]
compilation:
#echo Compilation
#$(MAKE) -f .makefiles/compile.mk --silent -j 8 -Oline
#Link
$(TARGET): compilation
#echo -e Linking $(TARGET)
#$(CC) $(LNKFLAGS) -o $(TARGETDIR)/$(TARGET) $(OBJECTS) $(LIBDIRS) $(LIB)
#Non-File Targets
.PHONY: all prebuild release rebuild clean resources directories run debug
.NOTPARALLEL: all
# include dependency files (*.d) if available
-include $(DEPENDS)
And this is my compile.mk:
include .makefiles/settings.mk
#Defauilt
all: $(OBJECTS)
#Compile
$(BUILDDIR)/%.$(OBJEXT): $(SRCDIR)/%.$(SRCEXT)
#echo -e Compiling: $<
#$(MD) -p $(dir $#)
#$(CC) $(COMFLAGS) $(INCDIRS) -c $< -o $#
#Non-File Targets
.PHONY: all
# include dependency files (*.d) if available
-include $(DEPENDS)
Until now, it's working.
Note that I'm calling compile.mk with -j flag AND -Oline so that parallel processing doesn't mess up with the output.
Any syntax color can be setted in the makefile main script, since the -O flag invalidates escape color codes.
I hope it can help.
I had a similar problem so ended up solving it on the command line, like so:
make target1; make target2
to force it to do the targets sequentially.