Build-host

[macau]

Hi all!
is anywhere tuned build-host for arch-arm? i want build some heavy packages like chromium or kde, but my laptop too slow and have little RAM
(chromium builds about 8hrs, firefox about 6hrs)

[WarheadsSE]

We mainly handle this on our own hardware. Either directly on the plugs, or via our dist-cc setup to a C2D laptop with a crap-tonne of ram and high-speed disks. We have no dedicated "build hosts", as unfortunately, we don't have the $$ to throw around fedora does :p

[WarheadsSE]

This is indeed true. Only my massive Hyper-V virtualization cluster nodes beat that beast of a rig he built.

[kmihelich]

Six core overclocked monster, to be specific.

Preprocessing and linking is still done on the devices, so blasting through compilations is only half the battle. You still need to tune the devices themselves. Best way with v5, since there is little RAM, is to allocate a nice 1GB chunk from tmpfs and export it over iSCSI as the swapfile for the plug. Takes the IO for swapping off the attached storage, and being in RAM on the other side just makes it sweeter. Also a 7200rpm disk attached to SATA is a large boost. For v7, give them an SSD. Even over USB, it beats any spinning disk you could put in its place by a significant margin.

In time I plan on getting the build system to a point where builds from other developers can queue what they want to go through the build system and build on my equipment here. I know a lot of people can't duplicate the distcc cross-compile setup, or run into problems with it, which is why I want to do this. It also maintains consistency across the repo, as every package is built in an identical pristine chroot environment against carefully built cross toolchains version-matched to what we use on the devices themselves.