On Tue, Nov 10, 2009 at 11:40 AM, Cedric Brisseau <cbriss...@gmail.com> wrote: > I have the impression that 'make -j' is only effective when just > invoking "make" in a kernel compile or "make build" in a > userland/xenocara build. > > It doesn't seem to have an effect on targets like 'depend', 'obj', > 'distrib-dears', 'clean', etc.
make can only parallelize dependencies, but not the work in a target. Targets like depend and clean don't have much in the way of dependencies. Also, a makefile like the below can't be parallelized, even though there's plenty of opportunity if it's rewritten. So don't write makefiles like this. program: cc -c a.c cc -c b.c cc -c c.c cc -o prog a.o b.o c.o