On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:15:12AM +0100, Thomas Drueke wrote: > Hi, > > is it possible to emerge packages to a $ROOT directory mounted via NFS ? > > The setup is > - machine A is equipped with a Quad core CPU > - machine B is equipped with an N330 Atom-CPU > - machine A is doing the system update on a local chroot-environment > for machine B and generates binary packages. These packages are > installed on machine B using the binary package feature of portage. > > I expected that the above setup would give an performance improvement > over letting machine B do the portage update itself. However a trial run > did not show significant improvement that justifies the effort. Machine > B still needs a reasonable amount of time to fetch unpack and install > the packages. > > An alternative way might be to mount machine B's / directory via NFS > and change make.conf's $ROOT variable to that mount point. > > Does that sound as a reasonable approach ?
I had a very old machine, that was really slow. Compiles could be offloaded by distcc, but even the ./configure-s and portage stuff (checking, upacking, ...) was reaaly slow... So I just used to export / through nfs, mounted it on a fast amd64 and basically did (other is the slow machine) mount other:/ /mnt/other mount -t proc proc /mnt/other/proc mount --bind /dev /mnt/other/dev mkdir /tmp/other mount --bind /tmp/other /mnt/other/var/tmp/portage mkdir /home/gentoo-other mount --bind /home/gentoo-other /mnt/other/home/gentoo linux32 chroot /mnt/other /bin/bash emerge..... For the last mkdir/mount, I have DISTDIR=/home/gentoo/distfiles and PKGDIR=/home/gentoo/packages in make.conf, you can do that with the standart /usr/portage/{distfiles,packages} This way most of the compile is done "localy" on the fast machine. yoyo > > Regards, > Thomas >