Best way for building packages on faster PC [SOLVED]

suroa · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2018 Posts: 2

Hey guys! I come here for help in regards to building packages for my relatively slow notebook on my faster desktop. And so far these are the ideas I've come up with and I'd like to know which is the best / fastest one and why.
A: Create a chroot on my desktop on which I have everything setup especifically for my notebook and create a binary portage repository on it from which my notebook will pull the packages.
B: Setup distcc on my notebook and desktop in order to build the packages.
C: The same as option A but adding distcc on my chroot and notebook.
Now the the one I'd like to do and seems to be the fastest one from my knowledge is option C. But I'm worried I might be actually bottlenecking build times by doing it comparing to option A.
Here's my setup:
Desktop:Ryzen 2400G,16GB of RAM 2400mhz
Notebook:i5-3230M, 8GB of RAM 1600mhz
They're both connected directly trough an ethernet cable.(The notebook is what I use to connect to the wifi since my desktop doesn't have a wifi card)
I'm also worried about bottlenecking since they're connected trough a 100mb/s only ethernet cable / network cards.Also I don't know if it's woth mentioning but my /var/tmp/portage and /tmp are both on tmpfs.

bunder · Bodhisattva Joined: 10 Apr 2004 Posts: 5934

the i5 is probably fine compared to older slow cpus like the intel atom, but i'd say you're probably fine with just distcc.
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NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2018 8:54 am Post subject:

suroa,

distcc will be slow with only a 100MBit network link.

Your AMD Ryzen and Intel i5 are not completely instruction set compatible. If you go with the chroot option, which will be the fastest, you will need to compromise on the instructions sets, since the Ryzen has to run the code in the chroot.
A few packages will need to be (re)built on the i5.

Not all packages can use distcc. e.g., gcc, rust, glibc? and a few others.
Using distcc means that your Ryzen will build i5 code, since it will never run on the Ryzen.
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Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

suroa · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2018 Posts: 2

Thank you guys for the answers!
I'll use distcc then.If it turns out a 100mbit connection really does bottleneck it I'll just compile everything on the notebook.