At the suggestion of rotvogel and others, I just tried using distcc to recompile my 2.6.9 kernel on my two-machine home LAN. Wow!

I had distcc use my wife's P4 3.0GHz desktop to help my little P3 850MHz Thinkpad, listing her machine first but running the show from my Thinkpad. My wife's machine normally gets used for e-mail, word-processing, the occasional DVD movie and my kids' games (the only time it gets to stretch its muscles at all). Today it got to do some real computing work.

Results: I didn't time my last kernel compile (on my Thinkpad alone), but I'm certain it took 90 minutes or more, perhaps even 2 hours. This time, the "make" step took only 11 minutes.

I wasn't sure how or whether I should use distcc with "make modules_install" and "make install", so those steps were done only by my Thinkpad. But the whole process was finished in 30 minutes or less.

Nice. Very nice.

A question: can distcc indeed be used for the "make modules_install" and "make install" steps? If so, then my Wow! will be written WOW! (sorry for the shouting).

Thanks for the suggestion, rotvogel et al.

You're welcome

I'm not sure the distcc option will improve the performance of the install commands, because the main activity there is to copy files and that will depend largely on speed of your disc. And laptop discs are slow afaik.

A branch out of this question. Does anybody know whether distcc works on cross platform. I have 1 Slackware, 1 Mac Os X.2 and 1 Mac Os X.3.

I know of a good article on distcc on ibm.com

I don't think distcc on make modules, make modules_install and make install would be of any difference. Infact, it maybe slower (this is speculation). Why slower? network latency. Since 2.6.* kernel compile everything (build in and modules) during make command; therefore there is nothing to be compiled anymore. As clawhead suggested, make *install is just copying the files into the respective places.

You maybe intrested with xgrid. It is Apple's Advanced Computation Group for creating distributed processing, something like what Virginia Tech's System X. Another example would be in stanford university

However, you would need xgrid agent for Linux

I personally haven't tried it. Did try it on both my Mac. Works great.