Stroller wrote:
On 31 Jul 2008, at 01:59, Simon wrote:...Your email is very long, so I'm not sure if I've taken it all in, but what I'd suggest is a shared /usr/portage directory (easily done by NFS) and distcc.This creates a dependency on the host that contains the portage tree. It also remove some flexibility. For example, taking my laptop away from my 'portage pc' would make it impossible for me to modify my current installs while away. There are other consideration and the use of a sync'ed portage tree on each pc vs using nfs is a debate that I won't go into now and this part is not much of an importance in my problem... compilation is!...Yes, your words about "dependency" and "flexibility" are valid, but this is also the most straightforward way to sync multiple machines at once. If you do need to emerge a package when the laptop is away from home then just --sync and it builds a portage tree at the "missing mountpoint" (if that makes sense).You may find it more elegant to make the one machine an rsync server for the others.http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/rsync.xmldistcc is, IMO, a bit more elegant than (for instance) trying to manually emerge binary packages for machine A on PC B. You can tell it to share the work or just unload it to the most powerful machine. There may be concerns about using a binary package if USE flags are different between the two machines, but distcc ensures that the package is built using those defined in make.conf of the machine on which you're running emerge.Yes! I was actually trying distcc today for the first time and got it working from the perspective of my fastest computer, I got some trouble though (see below). What you mentioned about running the `emerge -uDN world` on each individual machines + sharing built packages is absolutely awesome. Best of all worlds if i could say!Great! I'm glad you're happy with this. You're NFS exporting a sub-directory of /usr/portage, then, in order to share the built packages?However, when using distcc, I first made a trial with a small package 'xmahjongg' and got a nice x4 speedup on the overall emerge. I wanted to try with a larger package, 'povray' and stumbled on a linker issue, the issue is described below and this is the only obstacle on my way now. As I fear doing a `emerge -e system && emerge -e world` would never complete using distcc...Doing: `time emerge povray` without distcc yields a functionnal package, while when distcc was enabled, I would get lots of undefined references to some __pthreads functions. But I just tried and it seems to work fine, not reproducible, so I'll drop my distcc issue and go on with the -e recompilation.I assume that the "undefined references to __pthreads function" are errors which stop the compile? Or that they occur when you start the app, causing it to crash? Rather than compilation warnings?I assume compilation errors. My usage is that I can turn distcc off for the duration of the compile when I see something like this, and not bother investigating it further, but I think the most likely cause is that a library is needed for compilation that is not present on the distcc server. Portage accepts the compile-time dependency because it is filled on the distcc client, the machine on which you've run emerge, but when that particular bit is sent off to the distcc server then that machine doesn't have the lib needed.I would imagine that, assuming the above belief is correct, then the workaround would be to `emerge -o` the package on the other machines on your LAN (or the fastest machine, if you are using only that to emerge) before distcc'ing it. This is slightly inelegant.If you mostly have the same packages on all machines then hopefully you shouldn't encounter this scenario too often, although I'd also think that different USE flags could affect it.I'm also somewhat suspicious of different architectures - you wouldn't try compiling for ARM or MIPS on an x86 PC, but I'm not sure how compiling on an Athlon for a Pentium 3 or 4 affects things. Finally you should make sure all machines are using the same versions of gcc and glibc (also binutils? what else?).Stroller.
You can cross compile, I've done it multiple times before When my Athlon built packages for my celerons. Check out the Distcc-Cross Compile guide here [1]. Apparently the doc has been updated since I last checked as the tools have gotten full rewrites.
1) http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/cross-compiling-distcc.xml -- Eric Martin Key fingerprint = D1C4 086E DBB5 C18E 6FDA B215 6A25 7174 A941 3B9F
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