distcc and cross-compiling for FreeBSD on Linux/Solaris

Garrett Cooper youshi10 at u.washington.edu
Mon Oct 10 10:41:31 PDT 2005


On Oct 10, 2005, at 7:01 AM, Micah wrote:

> Andrew P. wrote:
>
>> We've got some mostly idle, but powerful sparc64
>> servers running Solaris 9/10, as well as a host of
>> Linux servers (x86 and x86_64). Of course, all the
>> real work is done on a pack of FreeBSD boxes :-)
>> Some days ago I started using ccache and distcc,
>> and I really love these tools. Now I want to get the
>> Solaris and Linux servers to do something useful
>> and compile world, kernels and ports for the
>> FreeBSD boxes. Is there a somewhat
>> comprehensive guide to this? Can somebody
>> share his experience with me? I'm now looking
>> into crosstool how-to's, but I have no knowledge
>> of gcc intrinsics, and some points are very hard
>> for me to understand.
>> Thanks,
>> Andrew P.
>>
>
> Have you looked at http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ 
> projects/other/distcc-31.0.81/linuxdoc/html/distcc-5.html
> It hints that you need to install a gcc that was built for your  
> target system on all machines that you're using.  I think distcc  
> handles library inconsitencies for you (at least it claims that you  
> need not have the same libraries installed on all machines).
>
> HTH,
> Micah

     IIRC, I think that the libraries are needed, but are semi- 
modular in the sense that all that you need to do is grab the libs  
and make sure your compiler is equivalent (ie no mixing gcc with cc,  
etc), and include the libs in your compilation. Not sure how you are  
going to grab the libs for FreeBSD though without possibly CVSup'ing  
the source, which I'm not saying is impossible-just a minute pain.  
So, in essence I may have been a bit too pessimistic about the task.
     I didn't really get into the subject of distcc though I suppose  
and should have read a bit more in-depth articles earlier. I was just  
exploring instruction sets for compiling via the similar architecture  
for a LAN distcc farm, but gave up after realizing there were far too  
many clients with differing archs from my own, and the benefit wasn't  
worth my time since it was all for charity.
-Garrett


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