Bug 142691

Summary: Make hangs with large values of parallel jobs (-j)
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: John William <jw2357>
Component: makeAssignee: Jakub Jelinek <jakub>
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE QA Contact: Brian Brock <bbrock>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 3   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i686   
OS: Linux   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: 3.80-6 Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2004-12-13 21:27:25 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
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Description John William 2004-12-12 23:00:17 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; 
Q312461)

Description of problem:
Passing make a large number of jobs, either as "-j n" or as "--
jobs==n" will hang make for large values of "n". The magic number 
appears to be 4098 on my test system. "make -j 4097" works 
correctly. "make -j 4098" hangs.

Note that make itself hangs - this isn't a problem with trying to 
spawn too many processes. Make will hang even when all targets are up-
to-date.

This bug has been present since at least RH6.2

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
make-3.80-5

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. "make -j 9999" - make hangs.
2.
3.
    

Actual Results:  Make hangs.

Expected Results:  Make should either give an error message, use a 
smaller value for -j with a warning or work correctly.

Additional info:

Comment 1 John William 2004-12-12 23:00:45 UTC
*** Bug 17374 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 2 Jakub Jelinek 2004-12-13 21:27:25 UTC
Well, it hurts, then don't do it ;)
Anyway, make-3.80-6 in tomorrow's rawhide should disregard -jN for N bigger
than PIPE_BUF.