buildhelper

Helper script for building with devtools-alarm on Arch ARM using distcc

Requirements

• A x86_64 box that will run distcc and the armv7h or arm8 toolchain (provided by AUR package linked below).
• You must be using graysky's modified devtools-alarm package or else the MAKEFLAGS are not passed to the build script and distccd will run slow as fuck.
• This script requires a few edits to work on your setup, see below.

Setup on the x86_64 volunteer

1. Install and configure distcc and distccd-alarm. This includes optionally opening up needed ports on your firewall.

Although not a requirement, it is highly recommended to provide the build space using NFS so that you are not hitting the RPi's uSD card with tons of I/O. One way to do this is to setup NFS and export one from another machine (could be the one that is serving NFS but that is not a requirement). If you have enough RAM on the other machine, better yet to use tmpfs instead of bare metal.

Setup on the ARM device

1. Copy build to ~/bin/ and make it executable.
2. Edit it replacing the value for the variable SERVER to correspond to the IP address or hostname of the x86_64 box.
3. Edit it replacing the value for the variable BUILDROOT to correspond to the directory or partition (NFS export or otherwise) to serve as the build root.
4. Put the two config files in ~/bin/ then edit them adjusting the DISTCC_HOSTS array therein to match your setup. Take care not to change the default port values as they correspond to the defaults in distccd-alarm. You can change the number after the slash to the number of cores on the x86_64 volunteer (16 is what I use for my hardware).
5. Install and configure distcc
6. Make sure you user has sudo rights.

Note that if you are using NFS for your buildroot, one way to manage mounting it is to edit /etc/fstab adding an entry for the NFS export like this: 10.9.8.234:/scratch /scratch nfs noauto,fg,nofail,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.mount-timeout=10,_netdev,x-systemd.idle-timeout=1m 0 0

Usage

To create or update the build root, just run: sudo build 7 or sudo build 8 on the ARM device. Once created, build as normal.

Example

% sudo build 8
--> Found a chroot so updating it...
:: Synchronizing package databases...
 core is up to date
 extra is up to date
 community is up to date
 alarm is up to date
 aur is up to date
:: Starting full system upgrade...
 there is nothing to do

 --> all setup!
 --> cd /scratch/path/to/PKGBUILD
 --> MAKEFLAGS=-jxx makechrootpkg -r /scratch/armc8

% cd /scratch/mesa
% MAKEFLAGS=-j32 makechrootpkg -r /scratch/armc8

In the example above, the x86_64 box has 32 cores. You should experiment with different values on your own hardware.