On Saturday 18 December 2010 10:18:43 Neil Bothwick wrote: > On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 22:56:29 +0000, Peter Humphrey wrote: > > I've bought (against my better judgement) an Atom N270 box to be a LAN > > server, but it's a bit slow compared with the other boxes on the > > network. A big bit, actually - 69 minutes to compile a kernel compared > > with less than 9 minutes on this workstation. > > > > I thought I'd give distcc a go, but after reading the Gentoo distcc and > > crossdev guides and doing what they say I get no result. I might just > > as well not have made the effort. The Atom box just labours with the > > emerge without trying to send anything to the server box I've set up > > for the purpose. > > I've found there's just too much overhead with distcc, plus much of the > work is still done locally. I have a couple of Atom boxes, a server and a > netbook, and I've set up a chroot for each on my workstation. In the > chroot I have FEATURES=buildpkg, using an NFS mounted PKGDIR available to > both computers, then I emerge -k on the Atom box.
I've been experimenting with nfs-mounting the whole Atom file system to /target in a chroot on my workstation, then setting --root=/target and --config- root=/target on every portage command. I can't recommend it. Numerous packages require to be installed into both the chroot and the target. I suppose that's not too onerous, even though I haven't found a way to predict which packages will be affected, but I've found that, when I go back to the Atom box and emerge -pkuv world, a lot of the packages that should already have been upgraded haven't been, and I have to emerge them on the Atom box directly. The states of the target and the native chroot are neither consistent nor independent - it's a mess. It was a nice idea to enable portage to work in this way, but it's still full of holes. Maybe all packages need some extra configuring; I don't know. A lot more work is definitely needed by someone, at any rate. I've decided to revert to Neil's method (once I've shaken this infection off). -- Rgds Peter
