Re: [PATCH] core-count: A new program to count the number of cpu cores

[James Youngman]

[ CC += bug-findutils, += Paolo, -= bug-coreutils ]

2009/11/3 Pádraig Brady <address@hidden>:
> Pádraig Brady wrote:
>> Paolo Bonzini wrote:
>>> Maybe we want a --parallel option (too bad -p is taken) for xargs that
>>> forces the creation of the number of processes passed with -P or taken
>>> from nproc (for example by starting "md5sum $1 $5 $9 ...", "md5sum $2 $6
>>> $10 ...", etc.)?
>>> That would be an interesting alternative to this core-count proposal...
>>
>> I'm not sure what you mean here.
>> I already suggested to the xargs maintainer that `xargs -P`
>> should be equivalent to xargs -P$(nproc).
>> `nproc` as an external command would still be useful though.
>
> Here's a patch for that.
> It needs to be updated to reference the new gnulib
> when Bruno's nproc update hits gnulib.

I'm sorry, I totally missed this email because although it was sent to
me it got buried under a ton of gnulib stuff.

As I understand things the intent of the patch is to (optionally I
suppose) make xargs keener to keep the CPUs busy (or whatever else
we're parallelising over I guess), even if it needs to launch
processes with short command lines to do so?   That is With -P N, if
there are less than N running children and xargs reads an argument it
should launch a new child process?   If that's the approximate idea, I
think that there could be use cases for this.

Could we discuss this aspect on bug-findutils instead?   Hence I
changed the subject and the CC list...

Thanks,
James.