Parallelization of recursive jobs in GNU make

Question

I am looking for an elegant way for the parallelization of jobs in GNU make. Here is a sample of what I did so far. Make processes the directories dir-1, dir-2 and dir-3 in a se

Answer 1

This probably will not answer your question directly, but besides what the other answers suggest, I would recommend to look into non-recursive make techniques. That is truly an elegant way to parallelize build, although, depending on what are the existing Makefiles, can require significant effort. Non-recursive make has advantages not limited to easy parallelization: it sees a complete dependency graph and so it does not need to build too little or too much, meaning faster (sometimes much faster) build times.

Some resources:

• Discussion on SO
• The classic text about trouble with recursive make
• Design of non-recursive makefile
• Implementation
• Another implementation
• Benchmarks (quite outdated though)