Compile farm?

[Jakob Østergaard]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 10:58:14AM -0500, Greg Lindahl wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 04, 2001 at 09:29:12PM +0100, Jakob Østergaard wrote:
> 
> > Problem is - mosix migrates jobs after a while. Initially a compiler
> > takes up a few megabytes of memory, but "after a while" it has grown
> > to hundreds of megabytes. When mosix decides to migrate the compiler
> > it will spend a long time on the netowrk to move the large process
> > image.
> 
> I've never used Mosix. Does it have the ability to set policies like
> "this binary should always be immediately migrated at exec" or "all
> processes should be migrated at exec"? You'd think it would... and
> using such policies would solve this particular problem.

Sorry for the lag  :)

I don't know if you can set "migrate on exec" - I didn't experiment that
much with it.  I did try to tell it to migrate as early as possible, but
couldn't make it do so to satisfaction...

But much has changed since then I'm sure.  I don't know if the early migration
options allow for migrate-on-exec - there would be some fundamental problems
with that too.  Mosix considers the CPU/memory requirements of the process and
migrates to the host "best suited at that time".   Mosix would have to know
about gcc, and know that it should migrate early, or (almost) never migrate.

I don't know how it would look today.

The other problem with Mosix is, that it requires you to run the same kernel on
all machines.  Now parallel compiles are usually done on a fairly homogenous
cluster, but in my situation it's not really an option to run the same kernel
revision on all machines.   I just keep my headers, libraries and tools
homogenous.

-- 
................................................................
:   jakob at unthought.net   : And I see the elder races,         :
:.........................: putrid forms of man                :
:   Jakob Østergaard      : See him rise and claim the earth,  :
:        OZ9ABN           : his downfall is at hand.           :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............: