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:
*** Bug 17374 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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.