Evolve III Maestro

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

I'm seeking some advice,

i got my hands on this mini laptop for about 60 bucks on a sale from Microcenter. It has a fully unlocked bios(Seriously 'every' option is available, fine-tuning the behavior of the igp, options to turn on or off 'audio enhancements' that other laptops brag about etc). , and you can replace the full lte cell card with a sata m.2 ssd. So i have been trying Duevan on it to use as a bluetooth music machine at work to ease off the use of my aging phone.
The problem is well, it's 60 bucks and while the hardware is 'great' for that price. the single antenna wifi-blutooth is a little animeic and does occasionally cut out in face of all the other signals in the area. The bluetooth usb adapter i have is stronger but Duevan doesn't like it even though it's one of the few binary distros without systemd.

So i decided to put gentoo on it. This is why i'm posting this. The machine is obviously way too anemic to compile a system, on it's own, in any reasonable sort of time. celeron n3450, 4gb of ram. And i know i can build a generic x86_64(it has most but not all the instructions listed for x86_64-v2 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Microarchitecture_levels ) build ina chroot and just copy it over, but that leaves updates as a question mark.

Optimally, Is there a way to set up my 32 core ryzen 5950x system to compile packages for it, and have it just grab those while only having it do this for packages it needs rather than the entire tree?
Or would i have to mess around with distcc and just dedicate 2-3 days a month on that?

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Build it on the "big" box, deploy it using a binary package host.

I use an AMD Phenom to build for my Intel laptop. I've personally opted for "amd64 generic", but I believe you can build with more specifics.

If I recall correctly, you can build in the chroot for different CPU capabilities. The key part is that not much has to run properly in the chroot. But since I use generic, I can't be of specific help there.

I make the binaries available to the client via http, but you can also use NFS, and possibly some other options. Using http, I've found that emerge options "-auDgKf" (fetch) followed by "-auDgK" work best.
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truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

At least how I've implemented it, the chroot is a "complete" system. Inside that chroot, you will need all of the components to run anything required during the build process. sys-apps/portage, gcc, clang, llvm and any other similar dependencies. If you need to execute it in the chroot, then it needs to be compatible with the host architecture. At least that's my understanding.

So hypothetically, you build a web browser in the chroot with whatever optimizations the celeron n3450 has. The browser won't run in the chroot, but it doesn't need to.

I haven't set up NFS to provide the packages, but it doesn't look unusual. mount the NFS export and tell Portage where to find it.

EDIT:

I'll add that the binary host doesn't necessarily guarantee changes elsewhere in the file system are automatically propagated to the client. So in the normal way that you maintain /etc files, you'll need to do it "twice." Once in the chroot, and once on the client. I haven't found a way around that, though I'm sure something like git would work. I haven't found it to be too problematic, but it is something that could become "out of sync."

Also, repositories need to be the same on the chroot as they are on the client. For the Gentoo repository, I compress it into a suqashfs image. That image is then mounted in the chroot and copied to the client. You should be able to use NFS for that too.
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Quis separabit? Quo animo?

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21607

There's no need to keep more than one copy of the data on any given system. NFS works fine, but if you want local storage, then you could sync once on the host, and have that subdirectory bindmounted where the chroot can see it too.

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

Goverp · Veteran Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 1998

FWIW you can download or rsync prebuilt daily squashfs portage trees from (and other rsync mirrors):
http://rsync.us.gentoo.org/gentoo/snapshots/squashfs/
I then rsync them around to my other machines as needed.
I only sync weekly: using the lzo-compressed images, rsync typically cuts the download by 25-30%.

See my post for a script to handle the rsync.
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Greybeard

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21607

Please describe exactly how you handled the symlink, and show us the output of namei -l /var/db/repos/gentoo (or such other path as you picked for $PORTDIR on the host).

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2022 11:05 am Post subject:

truekaiser,

Gentoo publishes a squashfs portage tree. Get your copy. It's 51M and you use it like that. My gentoo:: repo is 650M on a filesystem with 4k blocks.
Your kernel needs to support squashfs version 4 and either lzo or xz compression to match your image.

There is one point to be aware of. Its read only, so don't mount distfiles and your growing binary repo inside it.
There are knobs in make.conf to adjust that.
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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.

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21607

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21607

Is /mnt/Steam/Minifox/usr/portage where you store the shared tree? How did you configure the host side Portage to point to the shared tree?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2022 9:49 pm Post subject:

truekaiser,

That can't work by design as /usr/portage is outside the chroot.
Everything above /mnt/Steam/Minifox is no longer accessible once inside the chroot, so the symlink should appear to be broken.

A bind mound works.

distfiles sharing works too.

I use this wee ditty.

truekaiser · l33t Joined: 05 Mar 2004 Posts: 801

Hu · Moderator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 21607