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

[Paul Hartman <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Peter Humphrey
<peter@humphrey.ukfsn.org> wrote:
> On Saturday 20 August 2011 23:56:08 Paul Hartman wrote:
>
>> I have a fast desktop computer and a slow laptop. Both are ~amd64
>> Gentoo. After some of the recent discussions about Gentoo on slow
>> devices, I thought I'd dust off the laptop and try to bring it up to
>> date.
>>
>> I'd like to use distcc to make the desktop do all the compiling during
>> emerges. I've never been able to get distcc working properly, or, at
>> least, I've never been able to get it working to the point where using
>> distcc is any faster than not using it at all.
>
> Your laptop isn't sending its compilation jobs to your desktop. Have you
> used gkrellm or similar to check for network traffic?

Well, there are definitely some distcc jobs going to the desktop, I
see them, it's just that they finish so fast and there's a "long" time
between them. The logs indicate it is successfully compiling things.
But, it is in no way saturating the resources of the desktop, which is
what I was (perhaps naively) hoping to see.

> I think I'd take a different approach, one that I dare say you can
> anticipate. By all means take the advice you're about to be offered to get
> distcc working, but why not create a chroot on your desktop, NFS export the
> packages directory from the laptop to it and do the whole job there? Then
> return to the laptop and emerge -k. It does need more keystrokes but it uses
> far less CPU. You just need to copy /var/lib/portage/world, make.conf and
> the /etc/portage tree to the chroot before you start.
>
> I did once get distcc working, but as Neil has observed re Atoms, a lot of
> work is still done before compilation is farmed out to the distcc server,
> rather diluting the benefit of distributed compilation.

That was going to be my next approach if distcc just doesn't do enough. :)

Could I just export the entire laptop - everything from the root
directory and below - and chroot into that over the network? Then I
wouldn't even need to emerge -k...