[gentoo-user] Emerge and CPU core usage

[Dale]

Howdy,

As some may recall, I upgraded my rig to a 8 core CPU, expanded memory,
added a hard drive etc etc a while back.  All of which made things a bit
faster.  Each core isn't that much faster but the extra cores certainly
help in most cases.  It is a noticeable improvement.  There's one thing
tho that it just doesn't help much on.  That thing is the emerge command
itself.  When I run emerge, based on gkrellm etc, it always uses one
core and that's it.  As one knows, emerge can take a while trying to
figure out the best way to upgrade, especially when something is causing
a road block and requires a detour.  Will portage ever be able to use
more than one core?  I'd suspect that if it could use all available
cores, it would speed things up quite a bit.  It may not be 8 times
faster in my case but even 4 times faster would be nice, more even
better.  Others that have more cores/threads/whatever could see a even
larger speed increase. 

I'm sure trying to get portage to do things in parallel would be a
programmers nightmare.  It may not even be doable given how the tree is
done or that the complexity of calculating all the options is just to
much to run in parallel.  Still, does anyone think it will be possible
at some point?  Anyone else think it would be as awesome as I do? 
Anyone know if it is something that is being worked on?  I think I read
on -dev once long ago about this but can't recall details and I'm not
aware of any movement in that direction.  I haven't seen any mention of
it in a long while now.

Just curious. 

Dale

:-)  :-)