GNU Make 4.3 Speeds Up Linux Kernel Builds, Debugger/Profiler Fork Released

Linus Torvalds himself “changed around the kernel’s pipe code to use exclusive waits when reading or writing,” reports Phoronix. “While this doesn’t mean much for traditional/common piping of data, the GNU Make job-server is a big benefactor as it relies upon a pipe for limiting the parallelism” — especially on high-core-count CPUs. This drew an interesting follow-up from Slashdot reader rockyb, who was wondering if anyone could verify that GNU Make 4.3 speeds up build times: I updated and released a fork of that called remake which includes hooks to profile a build, and has a complete debugger in it (although most of the time the better tracing that is in there is enough). The most recent version has a feature though that I really like and use a lot which is adding an option to look in parent directories for a Makefile if none is found in the current directory. You can download the source code from either github or sourceforge. Both have a full list of the release notes. Sorry, at the time of this writing no packagers have picked up the newest release. Repology has a list of packages for older versions though.