26 Nov 08 Using distcc for distributed compiling on an alix 3c2

Since I’ve been working on the alix board for the robot it’s become increasingly useful to just compile software on the board itself rather than on a host machine – with an AMD Geode 500MHz processor, it’s certainly capable.

I generally work on a USB hard drive attached to one of the spare ports whilst I’m testing stuff live, and then I back up the hard drive every so often.

I made some modifications to the cp2102.c kernel module and I wanted to recompile the kernel on the board directly as I had some other modules I needed, such as for the wifi card. 2.6.18 compiled eventually over about 7 hours but after wanting to make further kernel changes, I decided that I didn’t have another 7 hours to wait. I decided to use distcc to compile ‘locally’ but use the processing power of any number of other servers.
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Tags: /etc/hosts, 2.6.18, 3c2, alix, apt-get, build kernel, cc, CC=distcc, compiled, cp2102, distcc, distccd, DISTCC_HOSTS, distributed compiler, g++, gcc, Intel Xeon, kernl module, ld, libc6, libc6-dev, Linux, make, the robot