Chris Theis wrote:
What I meant by building in parallel is load-sharing. Unfortunately I only
know tools under windows that will do this for you in a comfortable way
and I have no experience doing this under linux. However, a quick google
showed that this seems to be a common approach at the companies providing
linux distributions. IMHO this is the only way to speed up your
compilation process if you cannot apply precompiled headers. In case you
find another solution (or a tool to perform comfortable parallel builds
under linux) I'd be happy if you let me know.
Cheers
Chris
As is typical of me, I had the software installed and ready to go, I just
never took the time to read the documentation. I've also been reluctant to
mess with trying to get all my versions synchronized between systems. For
various reasons I tend to want different configurations on different boxes.
This is from the people who implemented SMBFS for Linux:
http://distcc.samba.org/
1. For each machine, download distcc, unpack, and do
./configure && make && sudo make install
2. On each of the servers, run distccd --daemon, with --allow options to
restrict access.
3. Put the names of the servers in your environment:
export DISTCC_HOSTS='localhost red green blue'
4. Build!
cd ~/work/linux-2.4.19; make -j8 CC=distcc
The install and config was actually _easier_ than what's described above.
I can't comment on the ROI yet. I can say my old klunker hasn't worked so
hard in years. I'm not really sure why it is spending so much time hitting
the harddrive, but I have an ancient 300 meg Western Digital I use for
extra swap space, and it is going crazy. It may turn out that it's so
slow, it actually slows down other build processes if it blocks. I have
another system I'm upgrading so I can tie it in as well. Also not a top of
the line.
I've been using this for a while:
http://ccache.samba.org/
It doesn't work magic, but it does seem to help.
--
"If our hypothesis is about anything and not about some one or more
particular things, then our deductions constitute mathematics. Thus
mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we
are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true." - Bertrand
Russell