use of PARALLEL in make - makefile

I have been working on makefiles and trying to reduce their compilation time. The structure of the my code consists of various sub directories each having its own makefile. The subdirectories in the main directory seem to be independent as whenever i run make in any of the subdirectories, it runs perfectly fine and shows no error. Thus, i want to run the sub-make for all subdirectories in parallel. Is it possible> and if yes, how?
Thank you in advance

Here is a crude but effective method:
SUBDIRS = /something /something/else /another
.PHONY: $(SUBDIRS) all
all: $(SUBDIRS)
$(SUBDIRS):
#$(MAKE) -s -C $#
Run this with make -j.

Related

calling sub makefiles in an easy way fails

I`m using a makefile and call some makefiles in subdirectories.
Can anyony explain me, why this works
$(MAKE) -C stub
$(MAKE) -C source
but this not
SUBDIRS = stub source
$(SUBDIRS):
$(MAKE) -C $#
First time I`m working with makefiles.
When you do not explicitly specify the target(s) to make, it will use the first target whose name doesn't start with a dot. Here, that target is stub.
Apparently, you expect all of the targets of the first rule to be used, but there can only be one default target.
The documentation isn't 100% clear on this.
You will get the desired behavior by prepending the rule:
all: $(SUBDIRS)

How to handle dependencies from recursive Makefile invocations?

I have a C project that consists of a fairly large number of source files, and to make some sense of them, I have put them into subdirectories (with subdirectories). The whole project results in only one executable file, however.
In order to build this project, then, I am using recursive Makefiles, where the Makefile in each non-toplevel directory links all the object files produced in that directory into a concatenated lib.o file (using ld -r, that is). I do have a Makefile system that can build this and works rather fine for what it is, but it cannot support parallel make, which I would like to fix.
The problem is that I cannot figure out a proper way to both force make to descend into each directory's subdirectories, but also have the local lib.o target depend on that without being forced to rebuild even when nothing has changed.
This is how it works, somewhat abbreviated (leaving out CFLAGS and whatnot):
default: build
SUBOBJECTS = $(patsubst %,%/lib.o,$(SUBDIRS))
.PHONY: $(SUBDIRS)
$(SUBDIRS):
#$(MAKE) -C $#
build: $(SUBDIRS) lib.o
lib.o: $(OBJECTS) $(SUBOBJECTS)
$(LD) $(LDFLAGS) -r -o $# $^
This is from a Makefile.common which all other Makefiles include. Every other Makefile would also define their own SUBDIRS and OBJECTS. It might look like this, for instance:
SUBDIRS = dir1 dir2
OBJECTS = object1.o object2.o
include ../Makefile.common # Or ../../Makefile.common, &c.
As you can see from this, the main target is really the build target, which depends on the subdirectories and lib.o. If I invoke parallel make on this, it won't know that lib.o cannot be built until make has already run recursively on the subdirectories and will sometimes attempt that, causing errors. However, if I make lib.o depend on the subdirectories, then lib.o will always be unnecessarily rebuilt on each invocation, in each directory.
Is there a way to solve this? I've wrecked my brains on this for quite a while now without being able to find a way out. I'm only using GNU make, so don't worry too much about being POSIX-compatible.

Submakes not being re-run with different target

I'm trying to get a top-level makefile to call make in a number of subfolders. The top-level has several targets and the important bit is shown below:
MAKE_DIRS := $(dir $(wildcard apps/**/Makefile))
.PHONY: clean_apps apps $(MAKE_DIRS)
clean_apps: TARGET_INFO := clean
apps clean_aps: $(MAKE_DIRS)
$(MAKE_DIRS):
$(MAKE) -C $# $(TARGET_INFO)
Now this works fine when I call the targets independently:
make apps; make clean_apps
However if I call them on the same commandline with:
make clean_apps apps
Then the apps target justs say nothing to do. I guess it's something to do with the dependency on the directories not having changed between invocations, but I thought the .PHONY command would avoid that problem...
I'm happy to know if there's a better way to deal with this.
Thanks,
bob
It is something much more simpler :
SUBDIRS := $(dir $(shell find apps -name "Makefile"))
.PHONY: all clean
all clean:
$(foreach DIR, $(SUBDIRS), $(MAKE) $(MAKEFLAGS) -C $(DIR) $#;)

How to handle different targets for same directories in parallel making

The question is about parallel making w/ GNU makefile.
Given a folder structure as below, the goal is to deliver a makefile that it supports make release/debug/clean in parallel.
project folder structure:
foo
+-foo1
+-foo2
+-foo3
The makefile may be sth like:
SUBDIR = foo1 foo2 foo3
.PHONY $(SUBDIR) release debug clean
release: $(SUBDIR)
$(SUBDIR):
$(MAKE) -C $# release
debug: $(SUBDIR)
#below is incorrect. $(SUBDIR) is overriden.
$(SUBDIR):
$(MAKE) -C $# debug
..
Sub directory list are set as phony targets for parallel making. but it lost the information of original target (release, debug, clean etc).
One method is to suffix the names for the directories and recover it in commands, but it is weird. another method might be to use variables, but not sure how to work it out.
The questions is:
How to write the rules for directories, that supports parallel making w/ different targets (release/debug/clean)?
Any hints are greatly appreciated.
Setting variables on the command line certainly works. You can also use MAKECMDGOALS (see the GNU make manual):
$(SUBDIR):
$(MAKE) -C $# $(MAKECMDGOALS)

Using make to build several binaries

I want to create a Makefile (in a parent dir) to call several other Makefiles (in sub dirs) such that I can build several binaries (one per project sub dir) by invoking just the one parent Makefile.
My research has been hampered by finding loads of stuff on recursive Makefiles, but I think this is where you are trying to build several directories Makefiles into a single binary?
Maybe what I want to do is better handled by a shell script perhaps invoking make in each sub directory in turn, but I thought a Makefile might be a more elegant solution?
any pointers gratefully received
PS using linux and the GNU tool chain
The for loop solution given in the first answer above actually shouldn't be used, as-is. In that method, if one of your sub-makes fails the build will not fail (as it should) but continue on with the other directories. Not only that, but the final result of the build will be whatever the exit code of the last subdirectory make was, so if that succeeded the build succeeds even if some other subdirectory failed. Not good!!
You could fix it by doing something like this:
all:
#for dir in $(SUBDIRS); \
do \
$(MAKE) -C $${dir} $# || exit $$?; \
done
However now you have the opposite problem: if you run "make -k" (continue even if there are errors) then this won't be obeyed in this situation. It'll still exit on failure.
An additional issue with both of the above methods is that they serialize the building of all subdirectories, so if you enable parallel builds (with make's -j option) that will only happen within a single subdirectory, instead of across all subdirectories.
Eregrith and sinsedrix have solutions that are closer to what you want, although FYI you should never, ever use "make" when you are invoking a recursive make invocation. As in johfel's example you should ALWAYS use $(MAKE).
Something like this is what you want:
SUBDIRS = subdir1 subdir1 subdir3 ...
all: $(addprefix all.,$(SUBDIRS))
all.%:
# $(MAKE) -C '$*' '$(basename $#)'
.PHONY: $(addprefix all.,$(SUBDIRS))
And of course you can add more stanzas like this for other targets such as "install" or whatever. There are even more fancy ways to handle building subdirectories with any generic target, but this requires a bit more detail.
If you want to support parallel builds you may need to declare dependencies at this level to avoid parallel builds of directories which depend on each other. For example in the above if you cannot build subdir3 until after both subdir1 and subdir2 are finished (but it's OK for subdir1 and subdir2 to build in parallel) then you can add something like this to your makefile:
all.subdir3 : all.subdir1 all.subdir2
You can call targets in subdirectory makefiles via
all:
$(MAKE) -C subdirectory1 $#
$(MAKE) -C subdirectory2 $#
...
or better
SUBDIRS=subd1 subd2 subd3
all:
#for dir in $(SUBDIRS); \
do \
$(MAKE) -C $${dir} $#; \
done
you should indeed use cmake to generate the Makefile automatically from a given CMakeLists.txt configuration file.
Here's a random link to get you started. Here you can find a simple sample project, including multiple subdirectories, executables, and a shared library.
Each makefile can have several target, it's still true with recursive makefiles, usually it's written:
all: target1 target2 target3
target1 :
make -C subdir
Then make all

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