Re: Improvements to build system etc. for edk2-platforms devel-MinnowBoard3?

["Brian J. Johnson" <brian.johnson@hpe.com>]

Sorry if I'm bikeshedding...  NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS isn't a good default 
for those of us who build on servers with hundreds of threads available. 
  The OS, disks, and build.exe/build.py become bottlenecks.  Maybe we 
could put a cap (say, 20) on the default thread limit, so it uses 
NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS or 20 threads, whichever is less.

Or just set a small, fixed number of threads by default and document 
better how to change it, as others suggested.

Brian

On 02/22/2017 08:49 PM, Wei, David wrote:
> Yes, as Brian said, at this stage,  patches are welcomed, including the python script.  You can also file bugs on https://bugzilla.tianocore.org/ for issue track and discussion.  Please remember to CC stakeholders.
>
> Specifically for the multi-thread building , I think maybe  NUMBER_OF_PROCESSORS Windows environment variable could be used as the proper thread number.
>
> Thanks,
> David  Wei
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Richardson, Brian
> Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2017 3:10 AM
> To: Rebecca Cran <rebecca@bluestop.org>; Gao, Liming <liming.gao@intel.com>; edk2-devel@lists.01.org
> Cc: Lu, ShifeiX A <shifeix.a.lu@intel.com>; Zimmer, Vincent <vincent.zimmer@intel.com>; Andrew Fish <afish@apple.com>; Wei, David <david.wei@intel.com>
> Subject: RE: [edk2] Improvements to build system etc. for edk2-platforms devel-MinnowBoard3?
>
> We're ok with help fixing issues (yay open source), so thanks for the help. Patches are welcome at this time. But we do track them in Bugzilla, so opening an issue there is the first step to a solution.
>
> For the processor thread setting, note that we have historically disabled processor threading by default because we don't know the build system configuration. While we at Intel prefer everyone own an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 or Intel(R) Xeon processor, we know that's not the case ... so keeping it disabled has been seen as a safe option. We should definitely do a better job of documenting that setting change, but I think we need to consider generically changing that setting by default in target.txt (which requires a Bugzilla entry).
>
> The .bat/.sh files are required to trigger post-build tools, which are OS dependent. Even if the build was triggered by a Python script, we still need to do some verification to make sure there are no functional differences when we build in a Windows environment versus Linux (work in progress).
>
> Thanks ... br
> ---
> Brian Richardson, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, Intel Software
> brian.richardson@intel.com -- @intel_Brian (Twitter & WeChat)
> https://software.intel.com/en-us/meet-the-developers/evangelists/team/brian-richardson
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: edk2-devel [mailto:edk2-devel-bounces@lists.01.org] On Behalf Of Rebecca Cran
> Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2017 11:53 AM
> To: Richardson, Brian <brian.richardson@intel.com>; Gao, Liming <liming.gao@intel.com>; edk2-devel@lists.01.org
> Cc: Lu, ShifeiX A <shifeix.a.lu@intel.com>; Zimmer, Vincent <vincent.zimmer@intel.com>; Andrew Fish <afish@apple.com>; Wei, David <david.wei@intel.com>
> Subject: Re: [edk2] Improvements to build system etc. for edk2-platforms devel-MinnowBoard3?
>
> On 2/22/2017 9:34 AM, Richardson, Brian wrote:
>> Thanks for the input. For future reference, you can use the TianoCore
>> Bugzilla to report issues on any EDK II feature/platform.
>> https://github.com/tianocore/tianocore.github.io/wiki/Reporting-Issues
>>
>> I agree the readme.md should be present, and use markup instead of plain text to work better in github. You can open an issue on this in Bugzilla.
>>
>> Normally, we ask folks to change the number of processor threads based on their system configuration. We don't add a larger thread number by default, but it might be good to set it '5' by default (assuming a dual core processor with hyperthreading) instead of '1' (assuming a single core system w/o threading). I don't know if this will cause any compatibility issues on older systems, but it's worth a check.
>>
>> At this time, MinnowBoard 3 build is only validated in Windows. That's why there is no equivalent .sh file for BuildBIOS yet, but it will be added once Linux build is verified and checked in.
>
> I'm more about _fixing_ issues I find rather than reporting them! Are you saying that patches wouldn't be welcome just now?  Is there a reason why you don't want to make full use of the CPU while building? And I understand that MinnowBoard 3 only builds under Windows at the moment, but if more of it built using python (and python is already listed as a prerequisite in the ReadMe file) the porting might be simpler.
>
> --
> Rebecca
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-- 
Brian J. Johnson
Enterprise X86 Lab

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

brian.johnson@hpe.com
+1 651 683 7521  Office

Eagan, MN
hpe.com