On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 7:35 PM, Peter Humphrey <pe...@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...
