> On Mon, Aug 04, 2003 at 03:54:56PM +0200, Matthias Urlichs wrote: >> Surprise, I was thinking about the same thing, yesterday. Basic idea: >> mount the slow system's build chroot from the fast server, replace >> gcc/g++/ld with scripts that call the server's version remotely. The >> biggest problem will probably be (a) getting all those pathnames right. > > Wouldn't it be possible to use something like distcc for this?
I wanted to suggest just the same when read this message. It is somewhat difficult to setup correct complete cross-compile environment which handles build-depends and all cases when programs other than compiler are executed during the build process. But it is not difficult to build a cross version of "cc1"/"cc1plus" and "as" programs, and just use distcc to run those on a fast x86-based computer. This is expected to decrease compile time dramatically. I'm not sure that current distcc in unstable can support such configuration, but it should be really easy to add this support. In fact, as far as I can remember, it is mentioned in distcc documentation that machines that run distcc and distccd may have different architecture. So buidd + distcc on a slow m68k/arm/whatever, and distccd on a fast P4 or Athlon, or even on several of those. This is expected to reduce the compile time to almost the same as it is on x86 :).