A friend pointed me to a blog in which Ronald Schmelzer, an analyst at ZapThink, asserts that the term “private cloud” is nothing more than empty marketing hype. Ironically, he proposes that we instead use the term “service-oriented cloud computing.” Maybe I’m being obtuse, but “service-oriented” anything is about the most buzzladen term I’ve heard [Read More →]
One challenge that we’ve faced at Electric Cloud is how to verify that our makefile parser correctly emulates GNU Make. We started by generating test cases based on a close reading of the gmake manual. Then we turned to real-world examples: makefiles from dozens of open source projects and from our customers. After several years [Read More →]
One of the problems facing cloud computing is the difficulty in getting data from your local servers to the cloud. My home Internet connection offers me maybe 768 Kbps upstream, on a good day, if I’m standing in the right place and nobody else in my neighborhood is home. Even at the office, we have [Read More →]
Like any system that has evolved over many years, GNU Make is rife with appendages of questionable utility. One area this is especially noticeable is the collection of built-in rules in gmake. These rules make it possible to do things like compile a C source file to an executable without even having a makefile, or [Read More →]
Nobody would ever claim that GNU Make is a general purpose programming language, but with a little work, we can coerce it into generating Fibonacci numbers for us. Why bother? Because we can.
I happened across a blog today that made the claim that accelerating builds by distributing to a cluster of computers is “a dying technology.” Instead, they said, you should take advantage of increasing CPU density to enable increasing levels of parallelism in your builds — a single system with eight or more cores is pretty [Read More →]
I recently wrote an article for CM Crossroads exploring various strategies for handling rules that generate multiple output files in GNU make. If you’ve ever struggled with this problem, you should check out the article. I don’t want to spoil the exciting conclusion, but it turns out that the only way to really correctly capture [Read More →]
ElectricAccelerator vs distcc – samba reloaded In an earlier post I compared the performance of ElectricAcclerator and distcc by building samba using each tool in turn on the same cluster. In that test I found that Accelerator bested distcc at suitably high levels of parallelism, but that distcc narrowly beat Accelerator at lower levels of [Read More →]
ElectricAccelerator annotation files are a fantastic way to get a grip on your build behavior and performance, but what if your Build (capital B) spans more than one invocation of emake? Annotation gives you a good look inside any single invocation, but there’s no way to get an overview of the entire process. You can’t [Read More →]
One of the challenges that any developer faces is finding a small test case that reproduces a defect reported by users. That’s often easier said than done: when the defect originally shows up during parsing of a makefile consisting of 20,000 lines of nested calls to $(eval), separating the interesting lines from the irrelevant lines [Read More →]
