Re: [gentoo-user] Hoping someone can help explain distcc to me

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

victor romanchuk writes:

> > Both machines contain "distcc" in FEATURES. It's not using
> > -march=native. I've tried various -jN values with no real difference
> > in performance.

-jN in make.conf's MAPEOPTS variable I assume, not as argument to emerge, 
which does something different. It also hides the normal compile messages, 
in case of problems you should see something like 'failed to distribute to 
<host>'.
And syslog on the desktop should list every distributed job.

Distcc helps a lot here when I use Gentoo on slow systems. Although they are 
still slow, because of time spent for configuring, or linking.

And maybe you are also using ccache, and your tests were recompiles of stuff 
already cached, so the slow machine is fast at this?


> i had noticed that distcc is peevish about CFLAGS: these should be
> compatible on both client and server. in my case i made these similar on
> both machines (laptop is core2duo and desktop is core2quad; both are
> running  amd64 arch)

I don't think this is true - as long as the CHOST is identical, there should 
be no problem.

> yet another way to install packages on weak notebook running it on the
> same arch as desktop runs, - is to create binaries at powerful machine
> (while emerging or with quickpkg utility) and share $PKGDIR with laptop

This means some extra work, and also use flags need to be compatible, but 
the speedup would be much bigger than with just distcc.

What about exporting the whole root file system and mounting it on the fast 
desktop, chrooting and emerging?

And then there's Sabayon, based on Gentoo, but with binary packages. And 
when you want to customize things (use different use flags), you can still 
compile stuff manually. I will try this for a slow desktop PC now, all this 
compiling is so annoying.

	Wonko