Re: Will using make -j actually use multiple processor cores?

[Paul Smith]

On Tue, 2014-11-04 at 19:35 +0530, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> Hello and thanks for your reply. The next question will be slightly OT
> but what would current GNU/Linux (like Kubuntu Trusty which I use for
> instance) do on a desktop i5 system with 4 cores? Would it use all the
> cores?

I don't really understand the question.  Maybe if you went up a level
and told us why you're asking this or what your goal is.

The kernel will use all available cores for something (unless you
specifically configured it to ignore some of them).  There are a lot of
processes that are running on a standard UNIX system, and all of them
(that aren't asleep waiting for something else to happen) need to be
run.  As long as there are at least 4 things that need to be run, then
the kernel will use all 4 cores to run things.

Those things may or may not be the commands that make is invoking,
depending on how busy your system is with other tasks at any given
moment.