Distributed Make

Distributed Make (dmake) marks the evolution of the make utility into a powerful and flexible tool that permits you to take full advantage of the potential of today's networks and powerful multiprocessor workstations. Using dmake, you can concurrently distribute the process of building large projects, consisting of many programs, over a number of workstations and, in the case of multiprocessor systems, over multiple CPUs.

You execute dmake on a dmake host and distribute jobs to build servers. You can also distribute jobs to the dmake host, in which case it is also considered to be a build server. The dmake utility distributes jobs based on makefile targets that it determines (based on your makefiles) can be built concurrently. You can use any machine as a build server that meets the following requirements:

• From the dmake host (the machine you are using) you must be able to use rsh, without being prompted for a password, to remotely execute commands on the build server. For example:

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  demo% rsh build_server which dmake
  /opt/SUNWspro/bin/dmake

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  Note -

  For more information about the rsh command see the rsh(1) man page or the system AnswerBook.

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• The bin directory in which the dmake software is installed must be accessible from the build server.

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  Note -

  For more information see the share(1M) mount(1M) man pages or the system AnswerBook.

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• The bin directory in which the dmake software is installed must be in your execution path when you rsh to the build server. Be sure this directory is added to the PATH variable in your .cshrc file (or equivalent), not in your .login file. You can verify this as follows:

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  demo% rsh build_server which dmake
  /opt/SUNWspro/bin/dmake
  

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• The source hierarchy you are building must be accessible from the build server.

From the dmake host you can control which build servers are used and how many dmake jobs are allotted to each build server. The number of dmake jobs that can run on a given build server can also be limited on that server.

For more information about dmake see Chapter 18, Using the dmake Utility."